Week 1 competitions

Did any other competitions get way behind schedule ? because of field problems, or other things? I know at one point at the Kettering District Competition we were 3 hours behind.

What did they do since they were behind? Just keep going till they caught up at night? How late was it at the end of Friday?

they cut lunch to a half hour, most teams took their lunch during a large brake they had, we all seemed to have one at one point, then they ran qualifing matches till 8pm, they wanted to get to mach 62 i thionk but we only made it to 52 by 8 so they said go home lol

There was a huge 45 minute delay before one of our matches where there was a field issue. They bypassed it and ended up bypassing a robot, but we had to eventually replay the match again (showing off our robot anyone?). That match was on everyone’s nerves. They didn’t let us turn off the robots, so as to not lose comms.

Today at Traverse City we were behind somewhat I think due to field errors, specifically what I am not sure. (Don’t know exactly how far behind). To my knowledge we were caught up by the end of the day.

What issues were there? I know the RTS system has been a big issue. Anyone think these will be resolved before other regionals?

I heard that there was some issue with the FMS at Kettering.

at several points, Finger Lakes was actually ahead of schedule!

We reached half an hour ahead at some points.

We got about the same thing in Hub city.

Kettering was not 3 hours behind, the times were wrong on the schedule given to teams… they accounted for a 2.5 min reset instead of the 5 that it was supposed to be. At one point it was behind by about an hour.

Edit: actually less then that, because it was allotting 5 mins per match, so 2.5 for the match, and 2.5 for load in, reset and load out.

cording to the match number we were on yesterday before they made the extended schedule going by the times we were 3 hrs off

Several 1/2 hour delays at Palmetto. The FTA had a couple of the netbooks and they were substituting the teams netbooks and laptops to get the matches going. If this happens to you, check your joysticks before letting the match start (IO tab). We had an alliance partner think his robot was dead at match start; but I happened to notice their game pad was seen by the new netbook at JS2. I got them to dragged it up to JS1 mid match and they were going again.

I wonder how many of these netbooks are also the only programming computers, and are hooked to the internet and windows updated. I have banned our DS computers from attaching to any network other than the robot radios. DS updates have happened only via USB.

The FTA was also going pit to pit asking about programming environment, NetworkTable usage, and camera usage. We used networktables last year, and never could get that code to compile with the 2013 WPILib (pushed to off season). So there were a lot of changes there. During build season, we had lots of shop comm issues that seemed to go away when we yanked all the NetworkTables stuff out of our code.

We were never behind 3 hours. The times were wrong on the schedule as somebody else mentioned. We were only behind 10 matches and at 1 point we were slightly ahead by a few minutes. It was a week 1 event and Kettering will always be a week 1 event, we have a lot of highly experienced people who help run the event. Everybody did an awesome job! Rarely does an event not have some technical problems of some sort. This is a difficult game and everybody from the field to pit support need to give themselves a nice pat on the back for such a great job.:smiley:

Edit: Did you notice on the match schedule that the last match was at 10:45 AM and that the alliance selection was for 12:30? Last matches are never at 10:45 AM.

We had 8 minute turn around times that grew to nine minute turn around times on Friday afternoon. IT was actually kind of frustrating because we had to slow down often and I’m used to driving the field to keep moving. We even had a 30 minute delay and caught up in three or four matches.

GSR had an 8 minute match prediction before lunch, with 9 minutes planned for after.
We lost 30 minutes in the morning of about 50 minutes of lunchtime buffer planned.

Made it all up in the afternoon, even with the manual counting of the disks that became mandatory.

Finished on Saturday by 5:30.

Hearing about all of the time problems at week one events, I feel lucky.
I expect week two to go even better.

Every week FIRST is learning lessons to make the competitions better. I was shocked how trouble free FLR was. Late season events rarely have issues like early season events do.

This was such a pleasant improvement this year at FLR, especially if you remember the incredibly long field fault fix during 2011…