My team has recently started modeling using the FTC ML It was very intuitive except for the credits for model training. After training our last models, we did not see the credit back to our account so we are now at zero minutes. We would be willing to pay for additional credits. How do we get more minutes?
If we have to setup our own version of the infrastructure, can you tell me the steps to provision it in Google Cloud?
I read through the suggestions on creating a good model. Thanks for the advice in those posts.
The only real reason why minutes would be “permanently lost” is if you delete the model you just created too soon after the model had completed (which is why there’s the big warning within the tool about it) - there’s honestly no reason to delete models, just don’t do it. Unused minutes usually take between a few minutes to an hour to be credited back to the account, if the minutes haven’t been credited back in 24 hours let me know and I’ll look into it.
There is no way to obtain more time in the system. We have budgeted the costs in the system to give each team the maximum allocation, and we do not have a system to provide teams a way to “purchase” more time. You can always send an email to ftctech@firstinspires.org to petition for additional time.
Google is currently in the process of deprecating the APIs that our platform uses for Machine Learning. As such, they have locked out new instances from using the APIs that we use - creating your own instance is unfortunately not possible at the moment. We have a volunteer developer working on porting our platform to use the new APIs, but it is not complete yet and we do not expect to have it available for teams during this competition season.