I have a question (and possibly a suggested feature addition) about the smart field controllers.
First, let me preface this by stating that I don’t have much experience with smart field controllers during a tournament as most tournaments in my area have still been using the older VEXnet field controllers. I’ve used them to run skills at competitions and in the classroom, but have never been fieldside or at TM when they were used on the competition fields until this past weekend. Overall, I prefer them to the old system and hope to change over to them at our local events.
We did, however have one snafu that I wanted to bring up. (Admittedly, this was our fault as scoring referees, but I expected that the software would prevent it and hope that it could be updated to prevent it in the future.)
As a scoring referee (or head ref if I don’t jump fields), as teams take the field, I double-check their numbers and plate colors and ensure that we have the right teams in the proper places for the match. With the smart field controllers, I still did that for the first few matches. But, since the system ID’s the teams and signifies their status on the field display, I got away from this practice. We eventually had one match where this caused an issue. (We manually fixed it)
Not sure how this got past everyone, but for one qualification match, the teams all had the wrong color plates and lined up on the alliance matching those colors. At first glance, everything looked good. Blue bots on Blue and Red bots on Red. The field display showed all teams as status green. We ran the match, blue won, and we recorded it. However, that gave the win to the wrong teams in TM (since it expected teams to be on the other color alliances.) We pulled the teams aside for a quick conversation where everyone agreed on the outcome and swapped the scoring to fix it.
The problem arose because we (mistakenly) assumed field control would identify that teams were not connected to the proper alliance station. We tested this with a few robots while waiting to start a few matches. Robots were correctly identified when connected to their alliance station. However, when a red robot connected to the blue station, the field software would ID it as the first blue robot regardless of which blue cable it used. When all 4 robots connected to the improper stations, the field display looked normal.
As I’ve already said, we should have caught this, but… is this expected behavior… and/or is it something that could be addressed in a future update to the field management software?
