Real week 1 update for you.

FIRST General Forum
1

Well we are in the midst of competing (very tired). I promised I would update as to week 1 going’s on. So teams competing know what to expect as they head into competitions.

Here it goes.

In all it was a blast, can’t wait for tomorrow!

  1. The field is way different than team fields. For instance the bar is much further than our team prop. Its a very wide gap. We can nail the bar in practice but have failed every time on the field… hooked it twice but ran out of time because we could not hook it first time (working on that)

  2. There will “likely” be missed defensive crossings , we had to run over one defense eight times to destroy it (its game 1 for officiating crew too) no hard feelings, but be aware the defense crossings are scored by eyesight. This did affect our ranking that 'should" be higher in terms of RP for breaching. Still happy where we are. We know we did it and in the big scheme probably won’t matter.

  3. Yes (as in other thread) some calls were missed like using SP for exit from opponent etc.

  4. EXPECT to be broken… We broke a tomahawk, sheered off our shooter “had to re-tap with six larger bolts” and had the Andy Mark tank treads break luckily we had the “improved” parts with us… so our bot has now reinforced tread pulley’s and shooter that has now broken twice. I hope we are past the break stages since we have all day tomorrow then next week in CV too. That’s nine games and eliminations most likely, fingers-crossed.

  5. Games will run late, we cut off two games and shortened lunch (30 minutes) to get through today. None w only ttree games behind… two regular one a makeup for a field fault.

  6. Vision is lame “smeared glass” especially for low goals a working camera is a must, still working on our auto HG routine.

A rookie team is winning! They have a super sleek super fast breach bot…wow. Its beautiful. Awesome job rookies!

Anyhow off to bed, any questions feel free to ask them and I will answer when I have time. Good luck.

2

Can you give some more details on how the AndyMark tread drive was broken? Was is only the drive pulleys, and if so were the breaks similar to what is discussed here?

3

Yes the middle pulleys disintegrated we ended up replacing four of them because that is what Andy Mark sent as replacements ahead of our first competition. They ordered eight more overnight yesterday. We should have them by CV next week.

It lasted about 4 games before they failed, happened in game.

4

The comment about defense crossings was intriguing.

an act performed by a ROBOT, such that it starts free of contact with an opponent DEFENSE and completely in the NEUTRAL ZONE, traverses the DEFENSE such that its BUMPERS go fully between the adjacent SHIELDS/GUARDRAIL, and ends up fully contained by the opponent’s COURTYARD

Are those 8 attempts crosses according to the manual or did you do something like driving back and forth over it 4 times without completely exiting the outer works every time?

If you did make 8 crosses according to the manual definition of a cross that would mean you had to actually go across the defense 16 times. It’s just a frightening concept. Are you sure you’re fully crossing and making it obvious?

5

We went over same defense 8 times total (not 16) clearing it each time in order to register two lights out…contributed to a failed a RP twice. Yes we cleared the defense each time. Its frustrating, seemed to get better after we lodged an inquiry. Happened earlier in games then we did not have an issue later.

My suggestion if it happens to your team stay on the field until its resolved. They said they could not change it after the fact.

We petitioned but nothing will change. Even have video of it…this happened in our first few matches.

6

These are the biggest similarities i have seen up here in Spokane, 5920 has been leading most of the day, our lead screw mechanisim broke in our 5 match (we are still 5th!) and just the first match was 45 minutes behind with early lunch being called before match 3 and running till 8 last night.

7

To some extent, this (behind schedule) happens every year with week 1.

This game is certainly rough on robots. Be sure you know your wiring and mechanics well enough that you can see what’s going on when something breaks.

Robots who are playing in 5 or 6 events will either be super robust or held together with spit and duct tape by the end.

8

What is the extra height on the hanging rung?

9

i will jump in on this one also. i volunteered at the Duluth events fri and sat.

  1. the portcullis opens very easy
  2. had a few problems with the sally port zip ties braking and broke a few draw bridges
  3. i didn’t see anyone open the sally port or drawbridge from the neutral zone
  4. i didn’t see any captures tell quarter finales
  5. one breaching bot and two shooting bots seems like a winning alliance
  6. most qualifier rounds 100pt or less
  7. as mentioned in another post “hard core auto” teams are crashing hard into drivers stations, at least once knocking a computer off to the ground.
  8. coordinating with alliance members is very important.

this event was run very well and was ahead of schedule many times

any other questions feel free to ask

10

I totally agree with everything up top. One thing to stress… use the question box for missed crosses. We got the score changed (it was initially 42-47, us losing), but we managed to have them count 2 missed crossing, ending 50-47. That was good.

About defenses. Most defenses are sturdy. At Waterbury, some problems arose with a bent rough terrain, which put the field on hold for ~20 minutes, and a broken sally port (on the side supports).

Most importantly, bring tools, and be able to fix most things on your robot. After every match, our team was bending something back into place and tightening bolts and collars. That’s important.

Waterbury was great today, looking forward to tomorrow!

11

Vision is lame “smeared glass” especially for low goals a working camera is a must, still working on our auto HG routine.

it was hard to see only sometimes, our drive team did not have a camera. However, by being careful in choosing defenses it was not a big problem. We just line up by hitting the tower and backing off the batter. Just for credibility I will add that I am on the drive team, also we have a sub 14" robot.

12

For our team, the camera is key. We have to use it to line up with defenses, especially the drawbridge and sally from behind.

13

Some things I’ve noticed is that sometimes defense damage is called late, although that’s expected to some degree since it’s called manually (afaik). (This can sometimes waste precious time)

Visibility is very poor, although the defenses do play a role in it the plastic/glass that drivers must see through makes it much more difficult as it’s difficult to see through and very smudged and scratched up.

Apparently our team (and a couple others) were having connectivity issues because safety blocks in default lab view code are getting info “too slowly” from FMS (as far as I understand it) causing the roborio/radio to restart(?).

Tech also had us (and other teams) place the Ethernet port on the radio in the socket nearest to the power adapter port. However after connectivity issues our team (and a couple others) switched it just to see what happens back to the regular port (further from the power port). Didn’t see any issues after that from radio :confused:

Ramming the driver stations is really a BIG issue, especially for teams that have large setups. Ours remained unaffected even when slammed against directly since it’s just a laptop thrown on there, but other teams with “raised” stations had theirs fall off often, often causing them to lose the match, connection, or sometimes entire laptops.

Cloth was removed from lowbar as expected (as others have pointed out)

Announcing (at least at waterford) was spectacular, although would like to see more involvement and care taken with the stream (and auto archiving on twitch turned on guys!!!).

Bandwidth for the school was a bit of an issue, and power cords/cabling even more so.

The drawbridge is REALLY floppy. Not at all like expected, turns into one big bump and may actually flick your robot right off if it’s light (ours is <60 pounds!!)

Human players bowling across the field seems to be okay.

It seems at the start no teams had auton working with any of the defenses. Nearing the latter half of day 1 a lot of the bigger teams had it working to some degree and almost all teams had proper auton (cept ours of course) even in qualifiers in day 2.

It also seems scrimmages/something must have gotten some times misinformation about the dimensions of some of the defenses. I remember the ramparts perhaps being a bit wider or the opposing side having a little less height.

Field durability repair (at Waterford at least) definitely improved at an increasing rate.
There were a couple of issues with people using hotspots, although i’m not going to pretend I know if that does/doesn’t affect connectivity.

Don’t know how I feel about the bagging rules. It’s got it’s fair share of positives and negatives, even for a super small rookie team.

Penalties (as the driver) were hard to notice, although that might just be an issue localized to us.

Other than that I didn’t really observe any negatives. Everyone was polite and super helpful people, tons of jamming out to the music by just everyone (even refs, THANK you to whoever did the playlist at Waterford haha), judges were extremely professional, nice, and listened to anything we had to say. Volunteers and all staff was great (even if their job meant I had to be hindered by goggles!!!).

Overall for the first competition ever attended by our team it was certainly an amazing experience, mixing just the right amount of professionalism and understanding good-will. We learned a ton, broke a ton more, and most importantly met some of the best people ever. Thanks week 1! :smiley:

(sorry for any repeating ideas that mighta been mentioned before!!!)

14

Well back from week 1 in San Diego, we made it to the semifinals and managed to beat as the #1 alliance we were alliance #8 …in two games . I pretty much helped get our alliance together as lead scout mentor and we had a real shot at winning it all. However we failed.

In all we proved we could Scale/Breach and shoot some low goals. Can do high too but did not feel the need to do so.

We had to rebuild our shooter between Quarter Finals and Semi-Finals as our hex shaft snapped in two…luckily Top Hat technicians had the very part we needed and we had time (since we won 2-0) to wait/work for other quarter matches to play , so in that hour we fixed our shooter. Another team lost their drive train in semis.

Then another problem arose… the boulder getting stuck in our shooter…we saw that happen in practice but it worked “well enough” we took a chance that it would be fine we were working to scale. Then it reared its head in semi’s. We were done. Not sure if humidity had anything to do with it but the boulders were tighter at the coast than inland

We are fixing (with out 30lb) both the shooter and strengthening it with steel hex shaft with our allowance as we head into central valley next weekend , surprising enough with our alliance partners Midnight Mechanics. we feel good about SD and how we performed and feel very confident with all the matches we played and driving experience , going into Central Valley next week.

Some lessons from today…

  1. Bring EVERY spare part, we left a perfectly good hex shaft at home and were too far to grab it during eliminations , we were VERY lucky one was in the building. Also hardening connections is a must.

  2. Be ready for DEFENSE (primarily in elims) when the ball was stuck we even played defense as well as many other robots and it was violent so be prepared for defense even if a team has never shown it…I saw at least four teams play defense in eliminations today that were not “defensive” bots and they affected the game dramatically. You should watch some SD to see effective defense played. Many shots knocked off course.

  3. Don’t over scale… we winched all the way up and it failed with one second left… we did not get scale points… we did get then another time and the first time the driver started 2 seconds early. All fixable now that we are consistent at hooking. Not sure what we had to go to the top each time …looks cool but it failed once that high.

As for the bar question…its not taller but further from the wall so there is more room behind the bar for a hook mechanism. However in practice it was easier than on the playing field we tried to scale almost every match and did not get it down until the last few matches , in fact it was out last qualification we scaled successfully. Then twice in eliminations.

We are content with how we did and look to do even better next week. Ramona Rampage and Midnight Mechanics were awesome and it was us that had the mechanical issue that held us back in semi’s . Hopefully that will not happen with the changes we make going into next week.

The teams that won(agency, paradox, coconuts) had three real decent shooters and all of them together could beach. We lost to them. Learned a lot though and excited to get back on it next week. Warlords got engineering and Catz got to go too as captain of losing alliance. That #1 “breaching only” in qualification rookie team won Rookie all-star (SMBLY required) they did awesome.

Anyhow good luck , I’ll give a week 2 update next week . Any questions continue to ask me and I’ll let you know what its like. In all we had a great time and look very forward to central valley.

15

I assume you were volunteering at the northern lights regional, as there actually a qualifications breach at Lake Superior. It was qualifications round 32 with teams 359, 2823, and 2538. There’s thoughts that it may be the first qualifications capture in the world and even if it wasn’t it was really awesome to see and have our team be part of :smiley:

16

towards the end of the quals at West Valley this morning 4980 started to really show off their capturing skills,scaling a couple times.

17

Its further out from castle wall than team version. Lots of room behind it.

18

I’ll weigh in real fast–the refs would tend to signal the result of a crossing attempt pretty quickly. Either the lights would go out, or a “cut” motion would be signaled. Gotta be fully clear on the NZ side beforehand AND on the Courtyard side afterwards.

19

They missed ours twice in early matches and as I said it got better as time went on. We fully cleared on both ends. I saw it with my own eyes.

Its a bit frustrating not getting a RP or two one day 1… I understand the difficulty but from a team perspective the rank matters for stuff you did especially for overnight rankings. It did not matter in long run for us (we assembled a great alliance so no harm or foul) but it is something refs need to be aware of , I wish there was quick instant replay ability as I have a feeling this will creep up again since its human scored and not sensors. They should allow teams to provide video and dispute it up to the end of the days matches IMO.

20

Counting the crossings as a referee is a lot harder than it appears. It’s very easy to get tunnel vision on one robot trying to cross, and missing others who are crossing. It takes practice as a referee to get used to it – it should get better further into the event.

Also, be careful when using the LEDs under the outer works as a reference. At certain angles from the driver stations the LEDs will appear to be on when they aren’t (this is also true for some referees). If you want to know for sure if you got the crossing quickly check the screen.