[Matt Krass]

I for one am on the bandwagon of wanting a final official specification from FIRST. I want to know exactly the force I'm expected to exert, for exactly how long, and exactly how clean the signal needs to be. I want to know what kind of sample rates, sensor wiring, and hysteresis is in place here. FIRST owes us that.

Before anyone jumps on me for blaming FIRST, I want to make it clear that I'm not mad at them. They gave us a very vague specification, we designed to it, we did our best, and it appears we have fallen short.

FIRST also designed to it, they designed a system to react to that vague specification, it seems they also have fallen short. They're now taking steps, within reasonable bounds, to correct that. I agree it's not wonderful, and it is unfortunate that teams in prior events are not going to benefit from this system, but I think we can all agree we'd rather improve it, then have everyone suffer in the name of fairness, especially on a playing field that will never be entirely level anyway.

Also, I agree with the people here that are concerned the system still isn't reliable, my inner engineers hunch is telling me it's not going to work as well as they want, and I don't agree with their approach of "We fixed it, trust us, and deal with it.".

But wait! I hold the teams responsible as well! We were given a vague specification, and everyone made their own interpretation of it, and many of us were wrong, and this is our mistake. Questions should have been asked weeks ago, more research done by teams, we all dropped the ball. I'm not saying people should assume failure, or injustice, but just one team asking FIRST for more information could have made a world of difference.

As I said before, I'm glad FIRST is stepping up and trying to fix their foul-up, now it's our turn to return that professionalism, ask questions and see what we have to work with, and do our best to meet the most accurate specification we can wrangle out of them.

Matt