Thanks!
We did not do as good as I had hoped. I had hoped to get autonomous running to score, but it did not happen.
Keep in contact!
I want to thank all those involved for hosting a great tournament. this gave my team great insight as to what we need to work on and improve on our robot. special thanks to 3018 Techna Pwn for all of your insight and time.
If you were at the tournament, you can imagine that the outcome for my team was disappointing.
BUT, I thought the tournament was hosted very well. The matches were kept on schedule for the most part, which very rarely seems to happen. The text messaging (though we didn’t partake in it) was a very good idea.
The demonstration was also very, very cool. I actually didn’t get a chance to see it myself because I was working during the time, but I could hear the music. Only at a VEX competition can you play the Mario and Zelda theme songs without getting made fun of. Thats what makes this competition special.
My only suggestion for the competition would be this: Have official judging sessions. I understand that this can be hard to do, but for my team to be able to show the judges everything we wanted to show them, a few 2 minute sessions doesn’t really work. Especially when certain members have worked on certain areas of the bot and were not present at different times that the judges stopped. It was a little disappointing, because we could not explain our bot as completely as if our whole team had been there.
Apart from that, I very much enjoyed the tournament. Its one of the nicest venues that we have a chance to visit each year, and I always love it. Also, the volunteers were all very nice and very helpful. That can make a huge difference in the impression you leave on competitors, and it definitely seemed that all volunteers WANTED to be there, and acted as such.
Thanks again for your work in hosting this tournament, and we’ll see you next year!
May your axles remain ever straight,
Collin
1200E New Divide
[RIGHT][LEFT]I like the private session time idea where we are in a seperate room iscolated from everyone.
The judges came to us at an akwrd time so we had to rush through, which is not good for us.
Other than that, thanks for a great competition.[/LEFT][/RIGHT]
My team did not do as well as I hoped either. 2 of the matches we didn’t have partners and the rest we only had vexNet for 1/2 the match or less probably.
As we were leaving someone on the bus checked there laptop and noticed 5 wifi connections available. That could have somehow played with vexNet.
Other than that, it was an excellent competition. I love the field set up with it being in an auditorium, and having the fields on stage.
Also, I would like to thank one of the referee’s, our intake didn’t pull down in the quarter finals. That caused us to get DQ’d, we deserved it and it is good thing he caught it. That is because if he didn’t then we would not have deserved to move on. I learned that you need to eliminate nearly every flaw in order to win. I was not to upset that we lost either because there is other competitions to win.
I believe that there would be a consensus on the judging amung teams. It just makes more sense to me personally to have a specific time at which we could be judged, in a quiet area, instead of having it at random VERY unexpected times during the day when the judges can barely hear us because of the noise.
Also, we never had time to completely talk to the judges because we had matches coming up, or they had to leave.
Again, just a suggestion
We had just finished our driver skills run when the judges came and wanted to talk to . We had a match coming up soon, and if it could get worse, some guy pulls out a dremel and starts cutting away. At one point i felt like i was yelling at the judges.
So i think papertowels suggestion is a good one.
Thank you to everyone who came to play at the Wildstang VEX Competition! I hope you all had a great time. For reference, all of the event results are posted here: VEX via.
We really have a great group of teams that comes to play every year. Several volunteers commented to me about how calm & courteous all the teams were - this is important since it helps us bring back volunteers year after year so we can keep the event running. This year a few issues came up where tough decisions had to be made, and we did our best to try to be as fair as we could. Thank you to those involved for handling these issues in stride and maintaining a positive attitude.
I also hope everyone enjoyed the performance from Dr. Zeus with his musical Tesla coils! I know I did. Hopefully some video will be up on Youtube, but in the meantime if you want to see some other cool videos of his, follow [
We monitored the Wifi in the theater throughout the day. I understand you had issues but I don’t believe that was the cause of them. 30 other teams there were using VEXnet and most matches went completely fine. If there was an environmental interference issue I’d expect to see problems with most or all matches rather than just with one team.
I’m not good at remembering which team numbers went with which robots, but as a general comment I will say there were a number of robots which clearly drew a lot of current from their batteries. Large robots with 6-wheel tank steering and large, heavy arms or lifts can cause excessive battery draw. It is difficult to prove, but I personally believe that most of the issues that were seen during the day were related to this - drawing a lot of current decreases the battery voltage until a point where the microcontroller resets. A fresh backup battery should help prevent this, but most of the teams showed up with dead or missing batteries for most matches. I suspect the VEX robots drain the backup batteries quickly (since teams almost always tell me that the battery is new when I point out the flashing red light indicating that it’s dead). Because of this, I’d suggest leaving your backup batteries disconnected except while on the competition field to save them as much as possible.
Anyway, we’ll take a look at things already mentioned and any other constructive criticism offered and try to improve even more for next year! Good luck with the rest of the season to all the teams who competed.
](www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dr.+zeus+tesla&oq=dr.+zeus+tesla)
Great tourney, thanks syntax error and bot-e builders for a pretty good alliance
wish we could have done a little better in the qualification rounds though, we had 2 matches without partners, and we had to have a rematch of a match we won and we lost the second time
but all in all a pretty good tourney
I can’t stress how important it is to have a good backup battery. We had a long discussion about this a few weeks back, there are some useful numbers somewhere in the middle of the thread. 9V Backup Battery - General Forum - VEX Forum
I i know for a fact that we were affected by vexnet in a negative way in everyone of our matches. we eventually got to the point where we could not run an autonomous or we would not have control during the match. once the competition switch was switched to operator control our joystick lights we: joystick: solid green; robot: none; vexnet: solid red; game: solid green.
we put a fresh 9volt on our bot as we got to the field (tested at 9.6v) and we did have a big bot, but the backup battery WAS NOT the issue. we always have our backup batteries disconnected except for the matches.
We did not have a very heavy lift/intake, and our drive train was not that big.
I know the last match we played in (Finals 2) we lost connection right after Driver Control started.
We had just changed the battery, and the 9v a few matches ago.
Oh, well. It is over.
My team as well had a charged backup battery and robot battery.
probably an issue with vexnet/field
This is from Paul Copioli when people were discussing VexNet drop outs at Worlds 2011:
First I’d like to thank Wildstang for putting on a great competition. I have high expectations for Wildstang from my time in FRC and you have never disappointed me. The event ran smoothly and the volunteers knew and enforced the rules appropriately.
Second, a special thanks to Syntax Error (1200A) and Techna Pwn (3018) for being great alliance partners.
Also a challenge to every team out there, do not leave the event until official scores are announced. Here is how the scenario played out. Our alliance lost the first match. In the second match it appeared we had lost again based on ball/barrel count, but after a delay ended up winning because of a DQ and went on to win match 3. One of our alliance members didn’t stick around to find out about the DQ and had already left the event by the time match 3 was over. As a result we had to play one of the matches in the next round with only 1 robot on the field. Not a good scenario in eliminations. We lost that round. There is not guarantee things would have turned out differently if the team had stuck around, but at least we would have had a fighting chance. So, please make sure someone from your team sticks around to hear the final official results.
How to handle the judging is a tough trade-off. I think the trade-off of more matches with the judges walking through the pits was reasonable.
Thanks again for a great competition and I look forward to next year.
Jay
ive checked all this stuff as it was basically directed at my team and others like mine from worlds.
I know that we had a Cortex that had a loose power connection - we ended up opening up the Cortex and reseating the plug, and after that it operated fine. We’ve also had a couple of bad VexNet keys which we’ve had to replace. Most of the time there is nothing wrong with the field and no interference happening at the venue. It can be difficult to diagnose where or what the problem is because there are so many possible sources of a VexNet outage, but blaming it on the field is unlikely to solve your problem in the long-term.
I recommend they try to reproduce the problem away from the field. If it reproduces, then try it with a different (known working if possible) set of vexnet USB keys.
I can guarantee you it is not the field. I know it’s tough when your robot doesn’t function correctly and I know it’s instinctive to blame the things that are outside of your control, but the field worked properly.
The VEXnet Field Control hardware has LED indicators that tells you the state of the field. These LEDs are controlled by the exact same electrical signals that are sent to your robot. If the LEDs are correct then the field is operating properly. The only remaining possible field issue would be a connection problem between the field control board and your robot, but VEX nicely put a “GAME” LED on the joystick that says what state it is receiving from the field. In your post you said this LED was solid green - which means driver control.
Process of elimination leaves your joystick, the VEXnet keys, the wireless link, and your Cortex. Wireless interference really wouldn’t cause the issues that you are reporting. Plus, it would be nearly impossible for interference to only affect a couple of teams while leaving the other 25+ teams alone. Looking at it objectively in this case I have to conclude that the problem likely lies with your equipment. That doesn’t mean it’s your fault or that it’s something you did wrong, but I can say with some certainty that it’s not the fault of our event either. Most likely, there’s a software bug or a bad/loose connection somewhere on your robot or joystick.
I did see a number of teams that couldn’t get their robots to link up before the match started, and in each of these cases I powered down their joystick, removed the VEXnet key, blew in the USB port on the joystick (probably not necessary), re-inserted the key and powered the joystick back up. This always seemed to fix that particular issue. My assumption is that the USB ports on those joysticks have gotten loose from lots of use. If anything this should be a reminder to be careful and gentle with the USB ports - I’ve seen some pretty rough handling from teams that were in a rush to get to a match.
I sincerely do sympathize with teams who had issues at our event and I don’t mean to minimize these issues (I’ve been there myself many times as a robotics team member), but at the same time I need to express my confidence in our setup. If you had issues and you have more events coming up, I’d certainly recommend spending some time trying to recreate the issues and hopefully get to the bottom of them.