**FIRST EMAIL**/FRC Robot Control System Survey

[Mark McLeod]

Greetings Teams:

As you may know, FIRST is currently working on developing a new FRC robot control system for the 2009 competition season and beyond.

Your experience and feedback as a veteran FRC team are extremely valuable to us, and therefore we would like to invite you to provide us with input on what your team hopes to see in the development of the new robot controller. Please follow the link below for access to the survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=RoX7zAUOFRwtAmzrHfg74g_3d_3d

Please note the survey will be available until September 21st at 5:00 pm EDT.


Thank you all in advance.


Go Teams!

[Greg Marra]

I just filled it out. They ask a lot of interesting questions, but I am not sure that they are the "right ones." They seem to be breaking programming into a lot of different functional units that it never winds up actually being split into.

However, it sounds like FIRST wants to make developing for the control system easier, so hopefully they will be providing many resources and examples with the new control system.

[JesseK]

I agree that they're not asking the "right" questions, but it also seems as if they've already narrowed down their choices and are now trying to choose between them based upon our input

If they get alot of mentors saying (example) "interrupt-driven programming, analog inputs" whereas students want "easier-to-code programming language" I wonder which they'd pick if they had to decide between them.

[EricVanWyk]

What are the "right" questions to ask then?

[Phil Mack]

What are the "right" questions to ask then?

Questions about the limiting factors of the current controller would be vital to the selection of the new controller.

I would have liked more detailed and more quantified analysis about usage of the current controller's features.

Questions about the development platform and tool chain would be of high impact in any decision about controller selection.

The section where we had to come up with 5 things we liked and 5 things we didn't like about the current controller was probably the most valuable source for what needs to be changed. I find it hard to believe that any truly useful information will be garnered from my opinions that were condensed into a few words to fit the format.

I would think that a more appropriate approach is to break down the features provided by the both current controller and the the alternative controllers being evaluated, then ask for our opinions on the features.

Asking questions about the difficulty of general processes without supplying more specific details or criteria is not only completely subjective, but also leads to widely varying interpretations of the questions.

The surveyors seem to be making underlying assumptions about what is easy and what is difficult.

I would hope we can keep this thread to what factors should be taken into consideration during a controller selection as opposed to debate over features, platforms, et cetera as is currently being discussed ad nauseam in several other threads.
~Phil