First things first, mad props to jpearman and his team (and apologies to all other contributors whose names I simply don’t know) for the new field system and generally for all of their contributions to all the cool stuff we get to play with. I always said - big companies with your big budgets and big pyramids: take a look at what can be accomplished with a small but dedicated team of talented people and our no-nonsense iterative approach. I was only able to watch matches in the two divisions my teams were in, for the basic reason that my feet, ankles, shins and knees (v1.0) almost stopped functioning from all the walking. But in those 2 divisions, I have not seen delays or major tech issues, looks like the new telemetry data sent to the brain controlling the field helps a lot (although a bit sad this runs on v5 brains - those are so pricey now and not even available, so harder on smaller or potentially new EPs - and their budgets - who will most likely stick with their Raspberry Pi setups for a while).
That being said, we did experience one issue which we solved empirically. Basically if we turn robot/controller on, THEN plug in smart cable, start code, select auton from our menu, when match starts our auton would start but did not look like anything we programmed (still have no idea where those moves came from). Working theory is that lines of code were skipped. We will examine the live stream footage closer and try to understand it better.
However, if we turn everything on, start program, select auton version from our custom menu and THEN plug in the field’s smart cable as the very last step, everything works nominally. So it’s what we did.
James has an older post describing some of the issues that might happen in a multi-task (or multi-thread depending on your language) environment. We used Pyton/RobotMesh, not a very popular (and not very supported as of late) combo but we stayed away from multi-threading. Our menu loops and runs outside the auton and driver containers but other than that not much complexity. Fun puzzle for the team to figure out.
Thank you RECF&VEX for another awesome Worlds!