I was at Madtown Throwdown this past weekend where teams were using the new Vivid-Hosting robot radios, and as far as I could tell they worked perfectly. No noticeable blips or lags in robot driving, nice-looking DS graphs, and, perhaps most significantly, very few field delays since the radios always seemed to link up on the first attempt, preempting the usual power-cycle-and-pray routine.
Contrast this to the 2023 FIRST Championship, where some divisions ran an hour or more behind, replaying matches for comms issues was not uncommon, and nontrivial resources were put into policing hotspots in the stands.
Let’s assume a sufficient quantity of the new radios have been manufactured by next April. Do you think FIRST should go ahead and implement their usage at the Championship? If so, what needs to happen to make it a positive experience for teams?
Pros
More than enough non-overlapping channels to run 8 divisions + 4 practice fields wirelessly
Decreased cycle times due to more reliable linkup
Fewer replays due to comms issues (or worse, match-outcome-affecting incidents that don’t get replayed due to insufficient evidence)
Cons
Logistical challenge of handing out the radios at the event and collecting them afterwards (or of keeping track and not sending those teams one in the Kit of Parts next year)
Lack of prior FTA/FTAA/CSA/RI/etc. familiarity in troubleshooting
Lack of team familiarity; potential wiring footguns pointed out in this thread
(I have no formal affiliation with or insider knowledge from either FIRST or Vivid-Hosting, but after seeing these radios in action twice I am excited and think it would be really cool to roll them out earlier, given the potential benefits!)
I have literally no experience with the new radios and I know the current ones are riddled with issues. I just worry about having to swap halfway through the event if something goes wrong. So yes these are great pros. I just worry that they haven’t been fully tested to know they are full proof
… I don’t want to accidentally repeat someone else. I think this will be a hot topic. I haven’t used the new radios but I have for years been a firm believer in not changing things at the last minute. This seems like the worst time to do a mass switchover to the new hardware if something does go wrong. It will take up more time to switch back than it would to deal with the current delays.
Our team has proven over and over and over what happens when you finish the bot at comp or make major changes without tons of testing. Please learn from us and don’t tempt the gremlins. They always find a way.
Evidence: Writing the Auton on the way to the match from the pits lead to this
While I think it would be good for a lot of teams, in my mind the stakes are kind of to high to do this. With that many teams the odds of someone burning out a component and hindering or killing their champs run is too high for me. I could also see the new radio creating issues with differences from the way teams packaged their old radios. It probably would be a net benefit, but the drawbacks would be very heavily concentrated on a few teams.
First reason: There’s a non-zero chance that there’s a bug that hasn’t been caught for some reason. While I trust Kiet and team to get it right, I don’t trust anybody–and I’m not sure they trust themselves–enough to throw it into a very public worst-case scenario event without trying it at a few more and larger events than so far.
Reason the second: If 1) goes poorly, it’ll be 2012 all over again. Ain’t NOBODY want that.
Third reason: It’s a mid-season change. Easily could go wrong.
Fourth reason: The backup–which teams would need to switch back to–is the OMP radios. 'Nuff said.
5th: No guarantee that enough radios and base station radios will be available and ready to go. I would say it’s probably pretty likely, but want to hedge my bets.
6th: If the FMS software has to be altered for the new radios, heaven help us ALL. (Experience at offseason events using Cheesy Arena’s latest version after Chezy Champs–but not the new radios. At least one had to roll back to a pre-Chezy version.)
Now, I could definitely see a test at or near Champs, or at least at Champs scale, with 36 radios or more on and talking simultaneously on 6 “fields”. 100% I’d expect to see that, possibly even during matches at Champs. But not actual use, not for 2024, unless more testing is done.
Basically: Great upside, but if something unforseen pops up, the downside is really far down there.
Happened to my team, at champs, where there was a disconnect that affected the entire field for a few very long seconds. Apparently the “threshold” wasn’t met for a rematch, although it cost us an RP. (There was one piece missing for a fourth RP).
This experience is one of the worst to have. It’s not because you did anything wrong, and you have nothing do to make sure it won’t happen again.
This 100%. If FIRST wants the most wifi-congested environment these radios are ever likely to face, they should take advantage of champs to stress-test them outside of the field.
Felt this! Happened to us, although thankfully it wouldn’t have affected us much since we were going to be the captains of the third alliance at Curie either way.
Maybe for the wireless practice field! I’m sure they could find a way to make six radios that simply have the network labeled on them so that when you are assigned “Red 1” you connect to the network labeled “Red 1”. Just make sure nobody takes it and runs off with it
I’m happy to hear that the new radios have been successful so far but one thing that has me worried is that since there haven’t that many matches yet under the new radio that there are still some undiscovered bugs that can only be explained by a huge volume of matches being played and revealing them.
I think maybe a smarter decision would be to have select Distric and Regional events with the new radios and then if FIRST decides its good enough for the championship then implement it there.
So we’re trading a known bad for full unknown at large scale.
Cant be any worse than 2019 Houston i guess. Still voted no though. We saw many teams have “concerns about changing things” come champs when it came to installing Zebra on Einstein, i dont see how this is any different for a much more critical component.
We used the radios at the Battle at the Border (BatB) this year, and I’m not sure if it was because of the radios or the field but we had quite a large amount of blackouts and delays due to network-related problems. Chezy Champs and Madtown Throwdown were much better, however.
The only difference between the usage at BatB and Chezy (I attended both events) was that the BatB radios did not utilize the wireless connections in the pits, although when wireless connection was used in the pits of Chezy Champs, it was important to recognize that the pits were very far away from the field, which was likely why they were not used at BatB.
edit in an edit in an edit in an edit: wow sorry for all those edits I swear it didn’t get that different
I would personally rather spend a season dealing with any possible early adopter issues with the new radios than continue to deal with the old radios for another season. I wouldn’t think there would be enough radios for every single team to switch over right away on such short notice, but in my perfect world teams would be given the option to go either way.
We replayed a qualification match twice (so three total plays, basically a finals series) at CMP because of one robot’s radio troubles. I am all for whatever prevents that from happening again.
We used the new radio at Chezy and loved it as much as everyone else.
BUT I don’t think you can expect teams to change radios mid-season, especially at CMP where the stakes are high enough to induce mistakes without introducing a robot component that most teams have never used before. To give teams the best chance possible to succeed with the new radio, give them a full offseason and build season to adjust and test with it.
For what its worth, my experience with the radios in the pit at chezy was that the pit had too much interference to have a reliable connection but the practice field worked great.
Would FIRST be one to proctor a pre/post-champs “event” where they keep the fields from the champs open for teams to debug the new radios? I understand a large number of teams would have to leave right after the champs, but for those who are staying another day, it could be a beneficial test to prepare for 2025.
This was explained to me (in conversations with those who spoke to the HQ employees who were at the event) as being an issue with the new version of FMS being run at the event, and somewhat confirmed by driver station logs showing that the robots were disabled during these “blackouts” while the DS still had perfect connection to the robot.
Also notable was the lack of live scoring and the post-match rankings page showing all arrows as pointing to the left (instead of up or down). Definitely seems like a very early build of next year’s FMS.
Edit: misread the event name (thank you @jtrv ), I am talking about Battle of the Bay in NH. Presumably the underlying issue is the same though.
