Real Week 2 update

FIRST General Forum
1

In day 1 of Central valley we actually worked our way up to #1 by the time the day ended…1678 will likely pass us due to not playing yet. We should end up Alliance captain 1,2 or 3. with three to play.

We got there by only losing 1 game , breaching every time, had on Capture with 254 and crew.

1678 and 254 are the best here, we just happen to be very good at collecting RP

So far we had to replace 4 of the pulleys from the treads (cracked again), my advice to teams with tank treads consider putting on Revision 4 before your competition and of course harden all connectors.

We upgrade our drive camera to http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Widescreen-Calling-Recording/dp/B006JH8T3S and its fantastic

As for telescoping poles this central valley competition has tons of teams with them 1678 is 30 foot high it seems.

Team 8 built a screen to obscure Birdseye views out of duct tape.
Anyhow off to Day 2…will update afterwards.

2

Examples of items that will violate R9 include (but are not limited to): A. Shields, curtains, or any other devices or materials designed or used to obstruct or limit the vision of any DRIVERS and/or COACHES and/ or interfere with their ability to safely control their ROBOT

Note that R9 probably makes such a screen illegal.

3

Any issues with lag in the picture on the DS? What size of picture are you displaying on the DS? What camera were you using before?

Thanks.

4

According to my driver the lag is 1 second, size was a big window, we were using the Microsoft 3000 prior… My driver did much better with the new camera he really liked it.

5

What is the framerate that you set on your camera? Ours is set for 10fps and it has virtually no lag.

6

Knock Knock Knocking on Finals… Three semi-finals and three almosts.

Last year we (1836,696) lost by a single scoring play to the ultimate winners in Ventura (1717,330 ,2761)
This year in San Diego we beat the #1 alliance (2-0) as the 8th alliance losing to eventual winners Alliance 5 in SF…out shooter had stuck ball issues which got fixed for the most part in CV. had our shooter been working we would have given 5 all they could handle but alas it happened then.

This year in Central Valley we lost by not coordinating “batter placement” to castle capture at the end in SF3:

In QF in CV we beat the alliance with our previous partner from SD 812… in two games.

In CV game 3 semi…
Us and 973 had the castle to 0 and both Us and 2135 were on the batter but both 2135 and 973 were trying for the center batter spot… 973 had to leave to try left spot and ran out of time…had they done that we would have been in the finals and even if we lost as captains would have earned a wildcard to the final world championship. just like last year in super tough competitions we were one play short… so close.

I’m super pleased we racked up 27 ranking points that was good for #3 rank.
The world high score was set by 1678, 3970 and 254… 210 points

Some thoughts on day 2 in CV…

Well we broke our hex shaft again! This time we were ready with a steel replacement and got it replaced over lunch.

We broke a strap on our shooter cage.

For elims we neutered our scaler as it was a liability in CV coming apart during the matches. Even though we scaled in SD in CV it was bent and once we got it fixed we never had an opportunity to use it while trying to stay in top 3.

We also ditched our goal shot camera ( to be able to reverse through Low bar to shave a few seconds) as we never quite got auto aim working so we secured that also… we we a simple Auto, Low goal, breacher withe a super fast intake bot in the eliminations in CV. We performed MUCH better than in San Diego, we were an asset and not a liability finally craked top 15 OPR in CV.

Our third bot 2135 had to rebuilt their drive train so most matches were just us and 973 at full strength. Conversely the other alliance we faced was down 1 in game 1 of SF. Its balanced out… the executed has we executed better we would have won game 3.

Scheduling curiosity and my observations over past two seasons … I see no valid reason why 5137 had to play 1678 THREE times in 10 Qualifications (One with Two against one with 254 too) also its sort of weird 1678 and 254 played together in a late qualification. I noticed this trend last year where top bots often were paired together. I have a statistical degree does not seem like a random enough scheduling. Nonetheless teams especially those without “world credentials” seeming need to play above (scheduling and calls) each year until they finally crack through t the elite status.

There was another late qual game where 1678’s (corrected) alliance seeming lost but upon further review it was a tie…that was a critical RP to get them to #1 past us at the time. I’m not saying it was a bad call/review necessarily but again an eyebrow raising…huh? I did not think it possible for 1678 to lose yet they apparently did until the tied decision.

As for calls forget bumper hang penalties…the judges did not call any and bots were constantly harassed in outworks. The world class teams still were successful as was that super strong rookie team Unirex. They have the hardest shot I’ve ever seen and only swerve drive there I saw.

Three robots were flipped/stuck in a QF game it was the triple tortuga.

Oh and when we were alliance captain 2 when they were talking about the teams …it was all this team won this , this team won that , this team is amazing…they came to us do you have anything to say? (Literally “I got nothing to add”). Wow thanks. Guess its just world creds that play. To be fair in eliminatios they finally dug up some things to say…Like RAS, SF in SD etc.

Game lessons… LG/breacher with fast intake and cycle times is a valid design choice (lots of wasted time on missed HG shots from teams), we never did CDF in either competition and still won consitently (we probably could…did in practice but it was our slowest defense to solo cross.

Well that’s it another year in the can…we’ll be back next year and rev up again. Perhaps one of these years we finally break through again to add to our RAS campaign.

I may see some of you in OC if I decide to ref … so good luck to all we had a blast in both competitions and met a ton of great teams , it was super exciting to work with 973 and 2135 awesome . Also had a blast with 1159/812 in SD beating the #1 alliance as #8 in two games was very cool too. The tank drive was the correct choice for us.

We’ve been very fortunate to earn rank high enough to pair with some of the best bots/teams in the world (973, 696) these last two seasons.

A successful and fun season overall.

Key lessons:

Don’t get too complex in planning stage…we wasted tons of time on auto aim and planning sensors…things we never used
Finish prior to week 6 of build (Try to build it by week 4 and consider a practice bot)
Anything not 100% reliable need fixed prior to competition (The ball stuck in our shooter really hampered chance in SD)
Bring spare parts…in SD we had to scramble for the hex shaft.
Questionable systems that don’t look that secure (as in may bend )…will BEND… so don’t have bendable stuff.

7

Remember practice lag and field lag are different… not sure on framerate we had ZERO lag in the pit. 1 second lag on the field of play with new camera and more with the 3000

8

So a couple of things, it is not that rare to have teams face each other multiple times at the same event, when the event has less than 50 teams. If you think about it you are at an event with 49 teams and you are going to play 10 matches. So that means that 48 teams get to fill the 50 spots that make up you alliance partners and the opposing alliance, in a perfect world that would mean that random team X and Y would play with and against you to make things fair, but alas we are not in a perfect world. At Palmetto, an event with 64 teams we never played with or against our eventual winning alliance partners 4451 and 1369 but we did play both with and against 2200. This is because in order to maximize the amount of time between matches for teams usually the algorithm will draw the teams for your next match from a set of 5 matches: The two before your match, your match, and the two after your match. Personally I wish there was a way to set the algorithm so based on event size it could limit the amount of time teams appear together in a match but I would match rather have the time to fix my robot, come up with a strategy and rest my drive team.

Top bots seemingly always being paired up together is also not to rare. Like I said above you have 48 teams to fill out the 50 slots to make up the matches you are in, so you have a 40% chance of them being an alliance partner and a 60% chance of them being on the opposing alliance not to weird. It is only noticeable when top teams are seemingly always randomly together because they are top teams, if you ran a statistical analysis of how many times a set of two teams have gotten paired up at a particular event versus how many times it could happen (ie number of times on an alliance over number of times both teams have attended the event), you may be surprised to find a lot of teams that the algorithm “likes” to pair up together.

I just checked 254’s match results and in quals they went 9 wins 1 loss. They never tied, so there was no critical RP getting them up to the number 2. Also 254 finished with 30 RP versus the 27 RP for your team, they would have needed to lose 2 more of their matches to have had them fall below you in the rankings.

That sucks, no other word for it but also remember those other teams earned those world/regional credentials. 973 your alliance partner is a former world champion which they earned, should your team have gotten their regional rookie all star award mentioned, yes, but that doesn’t take away from the amazing things that those other teams have accomplished.

At Orlando we had a similar thing done in the finals the number 1 seed was made up of 233 (13 Regional Wins, and 5 Einstein Appearances) 180 (7 Regional Wins, and 2012 World Champion) and 4592 (First Time in a Finals), versus 2383(1 regional Win, and a subdivision finalist), 3556 (1 finalist appearance) and 2797. 2797 Knight & Nerdy was competing in their 8th season and had just won the first official award in their entire existence the previous day with an imagery award and had never made it past quarter finals at a regional. Do you want to know what I thought when these things were announced, it wasn’t “wow look how bad those other teams are in comparison to 180 and 233” It was “wow we are finally getting the previous generation (2383 9 years, 2797 8 years, and 3556 6 years) competing with the veterans of their time (180 19 years, 233 18 years) and this generation (4592 4 years) making their debut with the big boys.” Don’t discredit your own accomplishments, it is a big deal for such a young team to be competing at the level you are especially with the giants of your state at the event, any team who you want to notice you, noticed you, and if they didn’t you didn’t want them to notice you in the first place.

9

Thanks 179 for the World Class perspective on my young three year observations starting with a team from scratch… I was there and there was a tie. I’m fairly certain it was with Blue alliance is wrong as I see no ties and there were several in CV. I’m pretty sure I am remembering it correctly as I knew it affected dropping us to 3. That 1RP versus 0RP was huge (at that point).

I appreciate the thorough explanation of how you see the schedule making.

We do pride ourselves on being the scrappy low resource team that seems to design effective bots and we take pride with getting the 27 RP in 10 which is similar to your own 22 in week 0.5 in 8 (within 0.75)… in qualifications. I love your bots I look forward to seeing them every year. We will earn our way back in one day and hope we share same side of the glass one day.

10

Well you need to get your memory checked because we were 9-1.

Our ranking had no bearing on anything anyways. It was completely irrelevant that we seeded 2nd. Everyone moved up one after we were picked.

11

Sorry 254 I think it was 1678 I remembered incorrectly you both blend together on the awesome 1,2 scale (according to match data 9-0-1) I got confused they 1678 had a tie…awesome job BTW

Like I said I could be wrong it was a long weekend. I stand corrected.

12

Yup, the screen was ruled illegal due to vision obstruction. The original intent was to block boulders so we replaced it with a netted duct tape version that functioned well in match 10.

13

Somebody with more knowledge please feel free to correct me. The match schedule is an algorithm. It can be tweaked a bit, but you cannot tell it to favor certain pairings.

If we were on the field with the likes of 254, we would be in the same boat as you. :] But there is a fact sheet you fill out to give to the announcer. It seems that it is always one of those last minute things that doesn’t get the attention it deserves when the teams fill it out.

14

Looking at the match schedule, you guys played against us twice (Q35, Q74), with us once (Q20), and with 254 once (Q52). Having to play against a good team twice is unfortunate, but at least you weren’t in match Q67!

15

Yup wish we were in the end matches though :slight_smile:

16

As a follow up to my scheduling observations from CVR here are the key matches where “top teams” met on the same field of play as partners or as opponents. Of course there were many good teams but these tend to be the best by historic achievements. 179 peaked my interest to look a bit deeper. My definition of top teams are those I noted going in based on achievement. Forgive me if I missed someone.

as of now, every team # in picture identified is less than number 1679

What I did was only extracted every game in which top teams crossed paths or partnered up and the results are seemingly not random at first glance of the same field games.

Three matches the top teams faced against each other BUT there were SIX matches where they were also alliance partners

I did our matches and got TWO such pairings whereas 5136 had more (they also made WC) and we are within one Team# of them.

So I think the algorithm may weight previous WC pairings more favorably than head to heads. Again I only looked at games where giants crossed paths in qualification.

It can seem random (about two three games per, probably that way for most teams) but one would think that Head to head versus Side by Side alliance members would be more even. Not off by a about a factor of two.

I get what 179 is saying also about game scheduling and time between matches also one regional is not enough sample size but it is curious to look at. Like I said I noticed this last year, I see patterns quite well my job as scout/strategy mentor and it carries on into this year. Perhaps with more years I will see it start to even out. For now it doesn’t really matter other than to satisfy my curiosity on how match scheduling really occurs.

The colors have nothing to do with my personal ranking of individual teams. Rather its just so I can identify the different top teams with different shades of green to better visualize it.

I’ll run similar test next year to see if it is similar or balances it out assuming we go to one the powerhouse regional’s again…they are fun. Hard to miss them around CA.

In the end I would not doubt this is done for entertainment value, as a bunch of 50 point games is not real exciting (140 is) however its not the most efficient way of getting as 179 calls it the “next generation” to show up regularly at worlds . They seem to have an uphill swim and scheduling in regional’s could explain some of it. Perhaps it can be a reason why some don’t make it for quite a while. But occasionally they do punch through. In no way did this affect us we got what we earned in both regional’s and could not ask for more than that this season.

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17

@boltman: I can’t help but feel for you a little bit. That’s also considering that they changed the schedule, and ours got ridiculously harder in the second one (even though we weren’t functional 99% of the time.) As for the one loss that 254 sustained, it was with us. Our CAN cycle broke, and their battery wasn’t clipped in properly. We lost by 4 points, and if you watch that match, if 5499 moved two more feet, a breach would have been granted, giving a slight win. Another park, you’d be winning for sure, but obviously the dynamics would have changed so that doesn’t mean anything. I will say this though, even in my time with 294 (2 world championships, few regional wins, countless finalist results) we often got left with horrendous schedules. Hell, they went undefeated in quals at LA with a horrendous one this year! Not to mention being left in the dust by admittedly bad referee calls. I’m not entirely sure it’s purely because they’re a good team, just that at this event the historically better ones got a bit better off. As much as I love Jim, I’d understand why he should have kept accomplishment bragging relevant to the current year, but that’s above my volunteer-grade.

I loved inspecting your bot, and I love seeing awesome 5k+ teams! I’m really disappointed your season is over, and y’all definitely deserved better. I hope the momentum stays up, and can’t wait to see y’all bigger and better in the future.

18

Thank you for the kind words, we had a great time at both regionals and actually enjoyed the two weeks in a row we put a lot of mileage on Varsam in the past 20 days since bag and tag. Might do the same next year. As our lead mentor said to me at CV “not sure what we would have done with weeks in between”

It does sting a bit to be so ridiculously close two years in a row in world class regionals. I post my thoughts and experiences to help other teams, its what I do during robot season. I always look forward to robot season a love seeing our team grow each year. Sure we’d love to be in worlds again who wouldn’t? We were very fortunate to go as rookies (and placed 90th) , I did not think we were the best rookie that year in SD so we were surprised. Last two years we earned it and had really good shots at i its fun to be able to hang with some of the best on the planet. That’s why I was personally a bit put off by the "pray for those in CV "comments leading up to week 2. I saw it as a fun time coming up…it was.

Sorry about your team issues too…that stinks when so close in a game to perfection.

This year , I know we played our best and it’ll just take a bit more to get there just have to do better and that is part of the fun. Thanks for the great Central Valley regional everyone was fantastic. We’ll be back next year somewhere in CA

19

Whatever you think you’re seeing here, you’re wrong. There is nothing about the algorithm that weights whether a team has made it to Champs. You’re grasping at straws.

20

@anon31892661 Congrats on another great season. 1836 was cheering you on from our shop. You were fantastic alliance partners last year. Hopefully we will see you at OC if you are there come say hi!