I just ran a 2-day event using the new OffSeason FMS and would like to post my report.

Event: SCRRF Fall Classic 2014
Dates: 9/27, 9/28/2014

Before the event:
- I tried to load the new FMS onto two Win7 laptops with only 2GB of RAM and both failed miserably.  FMS needs plenty of
 

RAM.  I didn't see any system specs on the web site or in the PDF docs.  Perhaps some minimum specs could be added.

Saturday (33 robots):
- I did find a Win7 laptop that would load and run FMS.  I loaded all the teams and generated a match schedule.  But 

unfortunately, it had a locked firewall for which I didn't have the password, so it wouldn't connect to any robots and 

couldn't run any matches.  (This isn't a bug, just some frustration about corporate controlled laptops)
- I tried a brand new Win8 laptop.  FMS installed and appeared to run, but would frequently throw up an error box when 

editing the team list.  This prevented us from entering more than 3 teams in the event.  (This is probably bug 3413.  
I'm 

having the owner re-test to see if he can workaround the bug.)
- In the end, I had to run the event using a combination of the the Win7 laptop that could do event management along 
with 

the 2009 FMS Lite to run the robots.  Inconvenient, but functional.

Sunday (24 robots):
- On Sunday, I located another Win7 laptop that would both run FMS and talk to the robots.  Yea!  I ran the entire event
 

from this laptop, but noted a few bugs (ranked in my priority order):
 1) The field monitor didn't work: The frame of the field monitor would appear, the team numbers would populate and 
would 

show bypass flags, but the squares were always white, no robot status.  This was really disappointing to be so close...
 2) In many matches, I would pre-start but 1-3 driver stations would not connect to FMS (neither on their end nor on 

mine).  The DSs that didn't connect would be random and it could happen to DSs that had successfully connected on 
previous 

matches.  After trying many things, I finally found that I had to back out of PreStart, go down a match, back up a match
, 

re-prestart, and then more DSs would connect.  There was still a chance that some wouldn't.  On one match late in the 
day, 

I had to re-prestart 3 times to get all 6 DSs to connect.
 3) Due to the complex nature of scoring this year, the scorekeepers were scoring the matches on paper and feeding the 

rolled-up scores to me.  I was not trying to use any of the breakdown buttons for cycles or anything like that.  I just 


recorded the match scores using the Fouls and Adj Score boxes on the Score tab.  The bug showed up on the Pit display: 
Two 

of the teams in the rankings were listed with '0' Teleop points despite the fact that they'd scored lots (the 22 other 

teams all had non-zero Teleop points).  This didn't appear to affect the ranking, only the display of their team stats.

Concerns for 2015:
- We had a 2015 beta test team (330) at the event and found that the 2015 DS defaults to 2015 mode.  If connected to 
2014 

FMS in 2015 mode, FMS crashes.  It was up to the team to always remember to set legacy mode before connecting to the 

field, which they *almost* always got right.

I expect to run a pre-bag scrimmage in February.  I really hope that an updated 2015 version of OffSeason FMS will be 

available for that event because I guarantee that a room full of nervous teams scrambling to get their robots running 
will 

forget to pick legacy FMS mode and will crash 2014 FMS on every single match.

Terry Wells
- SCRRF Field Ops
- Los Angeles Regional Field Supervisor