Lessons learned in all weeks.

FIRST General Forum
1

What have you learned in the past 3 weeks either from competing or watching competitions that could be useful for other teams to know?

Here’s a few that I have.
Human players, throwing might be faster but you don’t want to feed the other alliance by throwing weakly. Also, watch out for robots scoring on the pegs. I’ve seen lots of tubes hit a robot as it is scoring and the robot just picks the tube up and scores again.

Robots, if you can’t pick up off the floor you are going to be left behind. It’s faster to pick up off the ground and I’ve seen lots of cases where a tube is stuck in the lane and the robot can’t reach the feeder station.

Programmers, autonomus is important! If you complete a logo with an uber tube it is worth 30 points (on top row)

Drivers, make sure the logo is in the right order! I’ve seen a few backward logos wich gain no advantage.

These are my thoughts. Post yours here!

2

Human players like to think they’re playing defense by throwing a tube at a robot as it scores.

That doesn’t work. If it bounces off and descores a tube, congrats, you get a Red Card.

3

Is that what they were thinking? I thought it looked deliberate sometimes.

4

They were deliberately trying to knock a tube OUT of the robots possession, which is 100% legal.

But it usually never worked, or gets you a red card.

5

Ahhhh. Yeah, most teams have made their robots so that they don’t drop the tubes even when they get hit so hitting them with a tube does no good!

6

An accurate deployment system is better than a fast minibot. Well, at least until the elims and at St, Luis, then you need both!

7

Human players can make or break the game for your alliance. Make sure your throws are consistant and know they are going to make it. I have seen too many tubes bounce off a robot back into the other alliance’s scoring zone to be picked up and hung.

8

Here is our head ref calling the penalty on it-

If you skip to 4:30 she talks about it.

9

Yep. Good call. What regional is that?

10

Peachtree

11

Not True 1503 (spartonics) from niagara falls can not pick up off the ground, however they won the regional (pittsburgh), and finished 5th in qualifications. If can not pick up off the ground you need to be able to get a tube from the feeder quickely.

and yes a reliable minibot is more valuable than fast unreliable minibot.

12

Floor-loading is the key to taking home the gold for the tube part of the game — no exceptions. If you can reliably pick stuff up off the floor, you save tonnssssssssss of time compared to driving to the pocket. It’s even nicer when you can grab tubes in mid-air as they’re thrown by the opposing alliances human player.

13

That was a good call by the Peachtree referees! It was also good to hear an explanation of the penalty, rather than simply say that the blue alliance was given a red card (without explaining why.) Thanks for sharing the video.

What I found interesting is that the violation (which occurred at about 1:25 in the video) appeared to have been pointed out to the nearest referee by one of the folks at the scoring table!

14

179 dominated Florida as well getting it’s payload from the feeder.
You just need a good plan and be consistent in delivering the tubes quickly to the pegs.

15

I think two exceptions have been pointed out already: 1503 and 179.

16

I believe that also happened to 1261 in one of our quarterfinal matches as well. I think it was after this match too :rolleyes:

During matches I’ve seen so many human players sacrifice tubes to unsuccessfully try and stop a team from scoring. It gave them a nice tube conveniently nearby to score again right after.

17

The field gets so flooded with tubes sometimes it looks like a ball pit.
I don’t think it’s necessary to throw all those tubes out especially if you’re just helping the opposing alliance score more tubes. Teams should be more judicious about chucking tubes all over the place.

Also I can’t recall a more flimsy game piece than these tubes. They get trashed so easily. Every event it looks like were gonna run out of them. FIRST should at least double the amount they have on hand at the events to make sure we don’t run out.

18

Each feeder station is provided with enough tubes to fill up each alliance wall with 6 logos. I don’t think one team taking another’s tube is so important, since there are probably 11 other tubes of the same kind on the field.

19

I think you’re confusing people with the over use of the word each. I’m not sure where your getting six logos per alliance wall per feeder station.

Each feeder station (4, one on each corner of the field) contains three of each tube. So 12 of each game piece in total, some of which will still be with the human player or already on the grid.

20

Sorry! I meant 6 of each tube!