I'll admit, I haven't read this entire thread, but it looks very interesting, and I intend to read it in full later. On the note of radio boot time, my understanding is the 2009 radios booted right up, but they went out of production and we now have the DAP-1522s, which may or may not be changed at some time in the future to something that boots faster (for the record, the DAPs take about 50 seconds).
Also, I was thinking about this before reading this thread, and thought it would be cool if:
- Each team could design a control system from the ground up
- FIRST would give teams a protocol to confrom to for recieveing FMS messages, and the team could write their own driver stations
- The only req'd hardware would be some sort of remotely controllable POWER kill switch that the scoring table could use to actually cut power to the robot
- FIRST could provide an out of the box solution as an option, but teams could commercialize their control systems or design their own if they so chose
I understand most of this is probably not possible for one reason or another (mainly safety, and I think too many robots would get bypassed, and there would be a lack of support staff, since every robot could be different), but, it does seem like something that would be a lot of fun for the Control System guys on each team to implement, and probably gives more real world experience with Control System Design.
- Oliver