No Autonomous this year?

[Greg Ross]

Did anyone else notice that in the pinout for the competition port, no mention is made of autonomous mode? The only mention I found was that when the team number is set to zero, the RC will be autonomous, and that there is a status LED that blinks to indicate auto mode.

I suspect that this is simply an oversight, and that they will issue an update soon. But it could also mean that there will be no autonomous phase in the matches this year, since there would be no way for the competition controller to command the robots into auto mode!

[Joe Beynon]

the competition port pinout at innovationfirst.org still shows the autonomous switch between pins 8 (gnd) and 5 (autonomous). im not sure where you saw this other pinout.

edit: you looked at the oi documentation but it says to look at the separate competition port pinout for more details so id go by that.

[Buster]

there is a possibility that FIRST will not use autonomouse modes, but there's a BIGGER possibility that they will. FIRST just won't dump an idea. They'll use, use, and overuse! Then when it all seems over, they use it one last time.

[Rob Colatutto]

The new RC also has a yellow autonomous mode indicator LED, and the RC's are now dated so it seems to they will always be changing to be year specific. I would think automode is more than likely in and much more complex.
http://www.innovationfirst.com/FIRSTRobotics/images/2004-Robot-Controller.gif

[Greg Ross]

As a point of reference: I compared the competition port sections of this year's, and last year's OI reference, and they are nearly identical. The only addition is the following paragraph:For more details, please refer to the Competition Port Pinout Guide on our web site at
www.InnovationFirst.com/FIRSTRobotics/ under the Documents section.
The referenced document is, I believe, unchanged from last year. This tends to buttress my suspicion that it was an oversight, and that there will indeed be autonomy in the game again this year.

[danielkitchener]

There is a space for autonomous in the default code...so I'm guessing they'll have it. I don't see their programmers including it just for the heck of it.