New Zealand Nationals are back and will (hopefully) be better than ever. This coming Friday through Sunday (26th - 28th February) we’ll have 70 teams battling across two divisions to see who’s going to qualify for the 2016 World Championships. Everything will be live streamed so there should be plenty to see. The event will be held in the Vodafone Event Centre in Manukau.
As with last year, we will be using live scoring during the event. The FOCS, as we like to call it, although not guaranteed to be 100% accurate, will give you a good idea of who’s winning the match. We’re also confident we’ll get ref cam footage for the stream so you can get up close and personal with on field action.
Friday (26th) will be the live division selection. This will commence at 5:15 PM local time (2315 EST, 2015 PST 25th Feb).
On Saturday the Opening Ceremony will begin at 9:20 AM local time (1520 EST, 1220 PST 26 Feb) and Matches start at 10:00 AM (1600 EST, 1300 PST 26 Feb) and will end at 5:00 PM (2300 EST, 2000 PST 26 Feb).
On Sunday matches will begin at 9:00 AM local time (1500 EST, 1200 PST 27 Feb) and elimination rounds start at 1:00 PM (1900 EST, 1600 PST 27 Feb).
On Sunday during the awards ceremony we will also be announcing the 2016 KiwiChallenge game which myself, @Jij and @Oliver W have been working on.
Unfortunately this season is a lot harder to accurately live score as you have to count the balls entering the net without missing any, whereas last season you could easily count the score at any point in time. From some testing we did at one of our scrimmages it seems to be relatively accurate though, usually within a +/- 10 point range.
I meant to write FOCS, the joys of being tired. It means Front-end Overlay Competition Scorer. But as Tabor said before, it’s mostly just a pun so we can say, “What does the FOCS say?”
We introduced it last year, it’s just the internet here is so slow here it took a whole year for us to load the video and get the joke.
First day of set up is complete! It was a long one, with some of us on site for 14 hours, so I’m going to keep this very brief.
Thank you so much to the volunteers who actually showed up: Nathan, Hayden, Jess, Michelle, Stedtson, Jason, Reuben, John and Julien. Without these people nothing would be set up, and we’d still be stuck with this as apposed to this, which isn’t too far behind where we usually are.
Tomorrow afternoon at 5:15 PM NZDT we will be commencing division draw. This will be streamed at kiwibots.co.nz/stream if you’re interested. There will be a live chat up on YouTube if you have any questions.
We will be starting the live division draw in about 20 minutes. You can tune in on kiwibots.co.nz/stream. We’d like to thank SMC pneumatics and ATEED for their support with the stream.
With Division selection complete the final divisions are online at VexDB and RobotEvents.
There are a total of 67 teams across the Rockets and Robots divisions.
Note: the division lists have been broken on RE for about a year now, but everything works great on VexDB so it’s our suggested source of information. It only runs a few minutes behind the updates on RE.
We will be back tomorrow at 9:20 AM (NZDT) with opening ceremony, drivers meeting and matches from 10:30 AM.
Remember the stream can be found at kiwibots.co.nz/stream. Since the URL of the stream changes, this page will always direct you to the correct stream.
We will be turning the stream on again in about 15 minutes for the opening ceremony. The stream can be found at kiwibots.co.nz/stream. We’ll be live during the drivers meeting as well.
Opening Ceremony begins at 9:20 AM (NZDT)
Matches will start at about 10:30AM (NZDT).
For those that are interested the matches are streaming now. Up to Qaul 3. Really good feed and can switch between divisions to watch. Well done Kiwis.
