Well, a few teams dropped out of the Hawaii Regional, and we are faced with our first two-day event. Aack. Many travel plans to adjust… and many questions. I’m sure this is addressed somewhere in event documentation but I haven’t been able to find it.
We usually ‘load in’ on Wednesday (just a short 2-hour window, only loading allowed), and have Thursday to work on our robot, get inspected, and do practice matches. Now, however, I’m told we’ll have “load in and pit time” on Thursday, with practice matches on Friday morning, Quals on Friday afternoon and Sat morning. Will Thursday JUST be a load in and pit setup, or is there usually some time to actually work on the robot on Thursday? When do inspections occur - Thursday, or Friday morning?
Please, if someone could point me toward where I can read up on this stuff, it would be much appreciated! I’m kind of freaking out right now.
It sounds like the event has been changed to become a “small event”, which is the term to use in the manual, but it has basically 0 information pertaining to this (or really, in general). It seems like the Arkansas regional is in the same boat, looking at their schedule? I cant really infer either way on if you can work on the robot Thursday night, but it seems to be similar to a traditional wed night load in scenario (aka little to no working on the bot).
This is helpful - looks like inspections may happen on Thursday night. I got a reply from our coordinator that our Thursday hours may be 4-8pm - one hour less than the AR schedule, which says it includes inspection time. I think we’d better count on having our 'bot together (we’re transporting it in 3 pieces of checked baggage) before the ‘load in/inspection’ time starts.
I can’t comment on those specific regionals, but the aus regionals last year was a 2 day.
Going partially off memory, partially off schedule images I have.
We had load in for the ~2h from 7-9ish, and then practice matches until midday. Then it was quals matches until about midday (?) the next day and then finals from there.
What I found on the FIRST site says that they have as many (3-team) alliances as they can with at least 1 backup team. So if there are 23 teams, they have (23-1)/3 (round down) = 7 alliances. Alliance #1 would get a bye in the quarter-finals, as there’s no #8 for them to play against. If they get below (7*3)+1 = 22, they would only have 6, and #1 and #2 would have a bye.