What is the best place to ask Tournament Manager questions?
If you are an EP there is a TM section, ask and you can get access.
It would also be ok to ask in general, as not all TM users will have sought access to that category (I haven’t). Asking more people will get you an answer sooner.
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If you’re an Event Partner, you have access to FreshChat support in the admin section of robotevents.
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FreshChat support is the best, immediate method of communication, but in my experience is very limited and not the best support source overall. They assume the user is the problem and its very hard to stay on the same page as them. Nonetheless, I love the option for support and hope that it improves to eliminate some of these problems!
Thanks. Experiencing weird field disconnects with the smart field controllers where for the most part the brain keeps the field running but there is a red message that says “field disconnected”. Then for the next match it does not register robots plugged in. It takes a full reboot of the RPi for the connection to come back up. It’s not horrible as the matches actually do end properly but it is annoying to have to constantly reboot your fields. We swapped brains and tried new wires etc. Can’t figure it out. Also still have no idea what the new update does and the difference between the old way of installing full TM on the PI and the new way where you don’t needbTM on the PI. The techical difference not the obvious one (TM or no TM). Advantage? Disadvantage?
What version of PI do you have? 3B, 3B+, 4?
They are 4B with Waveshare PoE hats.
What is the new update thatvdoes not require TM to be on the Pi? Or am i mos understanding something in your original post?
I had to reimage all the PIs that we had from last year as the update did not work. Then after updating TM on the host PC and going into the screen that sets up the PIs there’s the update button. In the past that one would just update the software on the PI. Now it says you still can if you want to, but you don’t have to anymore. If you don’t then the PI will not care that the TM version on the host PC is not the same as on the PI. It’s a new thing (for us at least). My question has been since then what is the difference and what are the pros and cons of choosing one over another. I noticed more power consumption by the Pi and I’m curious to why. Also the disconnects started. Using the same PI 4B, same switch same router same cables etc. Not sure if related or not because I still don’t know what the update did and what this new remote PI stuff does.
The correct place to ask questions is in the EP Forum Tournament Manager section, as @Foster indicated.
We’ve had intermittent reports of this from others as well and have been working with RECF and VEX to try to track it down. Some users feel that it is specifically related to the Pi 4B (which I’m sure is why @Hudsonville_Robotics asked). Unfortunately, we have not been able to recreate it ourselves, despite running matches on a Pi 4B with a smart field controller for over 96 hours straight. The Pi 4B host controller firmware (unrelated to TM) did have at least one bug which caused data loss on the USB connections - we’re currently trying to determine if this could be the cause of the reported issues.
When you see “Field Disconnected”, that indicates that TM on the Pi is no longer getting a response from the smart field controller over the USB connection. We believe that you can probably recover from this condition by unplugging the USB cable and power from the smart field controller and then reconnecting it and turning it back on (without restarting the Pi), though we can’t verify that since we’re not able to reproduce the condition.
We’ve been working with RECF to get a capture of certain data when this happens. If anyone sees this issue occur, and if you’re able to say with some certainty when it happened (e.g. at about 11:15, or right before match Q25 or whatever), and you have access to the machine that was acting as the TM Server, then please contact our support email address so we can try to retrieve some information to help investigate the issue.
There are 2 parts to the TM Pi software: the operating system, and the TM application. The operating system is the image you download and flash to the SD card. It does not contain a copy of the TM application, though it does contain the management software that allows for network discovery and shows the IP address on the screen. The TM application has to be installed on the Pi image separately, and it should always be the exact same version as the software you’re running on Windows or Mac. Prior to this year, you would install the TM application on the Pi using the update mechanism in TM. There are 2 issues with that: 1) you have to manually install each new TM version on every Pi each time a TM update is released, which is tedious, and 2) since older TM software on the Pi sometimes works with newer TM on Windows/Mac, people sometimes just didn’t update the Pi TM application, leading to issues (not getting bugfixes or new features, compatibility issues, etc).
The change we made this year is that the Pi can now automatically download the TM application software from TM each time the Pi starts up. This means no more need to manually update the application software on each Pi each time TM is updated, and it will always have the latest TM software when it boots. Importantly, the TM software is exactly the same either way. However, if you ignore the warning in TM and update the software manually, then that version will be stored on the Pi’s SD card and reused each time the Pi boots. In other words, once you manually install the TM software on the Pi, you are now required to manually install it again each time there’s a TM update. Stated differently, if the Pi has TM software manually installed it will no longer automatically download the latest version from TM.
We’ve seen some misinformation being spread about this feature, especially on the Facebook coaches group, such as “it works better if it’s updated manually”. This makes no sense since the software is identical. In general, there is lots of very bad, very incorrect information being passed around about TM in unofficial forums, so we strongly recommend not taking advise from people in those places and instead seeking out official answers in the Tournament Manager section of this forum. Additionally, raising problems in the unofficial forums means that we don’t always hear about them and so don’t have a chance to investigate and potentially fix if it’s a genuine issue.
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Hey thank you for taking the time to explain things. Now at least I know how to try to approach this. Next time we use the field controllers in a real tournament we will attempt to document and log things for troubleshooting. Not sure why we used the 4B specifically for field control and the 3B+ for pit and audience display (perhaps someone felt the extra computing power would benefit field control or is simply stemmed from the COVID era supply chain issues and the inability to find PIs at the time). Will try with the old 3B+ to see if it becomes stable. Sadly we only see this is real tournaments (too stressful to systematically troubleshoot as everyone just wants to reboot everything and it is usually blamed on people stepping on cables etc…) and never while testing in the basement. But understanding how it works helps so thank you.
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@DWAB : One more question: does your software run on the Libre Computer “Sweet Potato” board (I know you mentioned “Le Potato” still supported for the time being on your site, this one is slightly different). Thanks.
We do not have a Sweet Potato board and so we haven’t tested it. I suspect it does not work with our image since the Sweet Potato uses UEFI to boot.
Can’t find an EP Forum anywhere. On Robotevents there is an “Event Partner Q&A” section but nobody discusses TM issues there… Who/where do I ask to get access?
I think you need to ask your EEM and they can grant you access.
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