Due to the layout of the venue at the event, the red side on all divisions had clear view of the field screens (For the audience to spectate) and the blue had no such advantage. In our case, being knocked out had nothing to do with a field vision advantage(it had everything to do with strike force having enough time to fix their vision), but I do wonder how much it impacted match play in other playoff matches.
In the future it might be better if the screens are moved above the field or to a more neutral location, or have screens set up on the opposite side as well so no alliance benefits unfairly
I’m open to critique here, so if you disagree please change my mind
As a member of 2834, I can safely say that the scoreboard location was irrelevant. You don’t have time to look at it until you climb, and all the scores from the red side (on Dow and Ford) are covered by the player station wall on the far side. As for DTE and Consumers, the blue side had that “advantage”.
I get what you mean, but any alliance should be able to compete without any scoreboard.
I think that’s his point. One side doesn’t have to take time to look at the board, as the information is passively displayed in front of them. The other has to turn around, actively choosing to process this information.
That said, this inherent imbalance is just the reality of many FRC events across the country - certainly any event with a big projection screen. It’s hard to say this imbalance is larger than, say, the imbalance of being on a preferred side of an asymmetrical field, but I guess it’s there. It’s not really something gigantic or anything that can be (or should be?) dealt with this season, though.
In the past, a small screen was provided to the disadvantaged alliance in certain years so they could more easily see the real time score. I would appreciate it if that come back, or perhaps if the real time score were able to be sent to the driver station or something.
I’m not saying it was a huge advantage, but the scores and more importantly real-time robot locations in the mid field blindspot definitely helped me as a driver when we had that side of the field.
As someone who worked on the A/V crew for FIMCHMP, I can say that the screen locations were a compromise made for maximum audience visibility. We would have preferred to place the screens above the scoring tables (parallel to the fields) to allow for even visibility between sides, however this would mean that roughly 1/3 of the audience would not only have had a poor view of the game (sitting behind the driver station), but also had little to no view of the screens.
As far as providing an auxiliary screen for drivers, that’s certainly something we can look into in the future, the main deciding factors as to why it was not provided this year was a combination of space around the field, money, time, setup complexity, and, in the grand scheme of things, it was also fairly low on the priority list.
To my knowledge, this was the first time FiM has attempted such a complicated video setup, we had 4 independent fields running simultaneously, requiring each to have an independent video system that could also tie into a single live feed from the primary field (Dow). On top of that, we also had to manage video and ranking feeds to the pits via a network with limited bandwidth, plus manage streaming, recording, and coordination of audio both for each individual field and venue-wide.
To my knowledge, the ability to see the live score display (or the accuracy of the live score for that matter) is not guaranteed at any venue (nor is it required in the manual), however, though I can’t speak for FiM itself, as a former robot driver I know how frustrating poor scoreboard visibility can be. I will try to work with FiM going forwards to find ways to improve scoreboard visibility for all participants at future events.
While we did have a less than ideal view from the Blue side on Consumer’s it in no way hampered our ability to compete. The only time I looked at the screen was to see who was ahead at the end of Auto. In the elimination rounds we had the extra Human Player call out scores and other issues he could see by watching the screen. This actually worked better for us on the Blue side.
At Hub City, if you were the side with your backs to the big screen, you had a giant TV by the side of the driver station that you could use to make calls, gather info, etc. It was pretty helpful, and made it so neither side had an inherent advantage of the other.
P.S. Also, excellent point. It seems to me that the FMS could very easily tell teams info that would be useful. For example, the state of the touchpads. I don’t know how many teams would actually use it but I can tell you that if the FMS doesn’t send it, the number of teams using it will be exactly zero.
Yeah, I’ve been firing shots at them for a while. The beta-testing teams have been invited to go chat with the WPI, NI, and FIRST folks as part of the beta process this year so I’m going to take advantage of that and discuss the lack of FMS documentation with them. It’s a known issue and I think they genuinely want to resolve it but I don’t feel like it’s a high enough priority for them at the moment.
I suspect it does send the data or at least the data is available to retrieve if you know which end point to ask and what to ask for.
Oh no, if the field was fully documented and released to the public, that would be a security issue, because clearly, security by obscurity is a valid security model.
If would be amazing to see FIRST at least partially open source the FMS system. Note that doesn’t mean they have to even allow non-staff to contribute, but at least people could submit features and, if they peaked FIRST’s interest, they could possibly be implemented. This is a really good community that has a lot of smart software guys in it. Doing this avoids the aforementioned security pitfall and finally opens up the FMS black box.
EDIT: By FMS I am referring to the System as a whole, includiny both the software that runs on the various components and the networking setup itself.
I will take a moment to state that FMS =/= the Field Network, which is where I think 80% of the problems teams encounter actually are. Publishing the configurations and enabling teams to re-create the field network would help to solve many of these problems. As for making FMS open source: sure, why not? It’s got to be better than what we currently are looking at.
Further, if they want to pretend like they are following industry trends then offering incentives to teams to report bugs and issues (How about an exclusive “I pwned Frank Merrick” t-shirt?) would be good too.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see this number stay nearly the same if it did.
I’ve watched countless teams on the field. I’ve watched during normal operation and during downtimes. I rarely see teams look at the driver station no matter how fancy the dashboard might be.
It’s always surprised me to see a team lose communication on the field and be looking across the field at the robot rather than taking a look at the driver station for any hints as to why they lost communication or when they’ll return. I’ve had times I’ve told a team to get back to playing after they come up to be told “we lost comms, we can’t” and had to explain they lost them but they’re all green again.
While I’m not opposed to opening up the API to share what the FMS knows about the game, I’m curious as to what we’d expect the ROI would be.
I can personally guarantee at least one team that would take advantage of a proper documented field API. We’ve actually talked about using NNs and OCR for putting a camera on the scoreboard in matches. An API would be a lot easier, likely benefit more teams, and would provide something akin to a real world paradigm where we are often given APIs to talk to.
What happened to the screens located above the driver station in 2014? They showed the assist progression and score for each alliance. Once you got used to looking for it, it made coaching a lot easier. My vote would be to bring that back.
We had a similar setup at CIR where blue had a straight ahead look at the screen. Red side did have a screen to look at but it was very high and far away. I found myself turning around periodically…
No? I’ve been doing this since 2006 so either you’re looking WAY far back or you’re thinking of a specific feature at a specific event.
I’m not crazy right? I remember 2014 very well and no event we went to had any sort of screen mounted above the driver stations. Specific to Regionals perhaps? Or just certain events?
