[Kevin Sevcik]

Wheeee. Well I feel a need to post a small rejoinder to plnyyanks' post above. My only quibble with his post is the suggestion that this isn't anyone's fault. This is unequivocally, without a doubt, FIRST's fault.

Understand, I'm not saying that the root cause lies with the field or something. I think it's pretty clear the the root cause of these failures must be associated with particular robots in some fashion. Galileo didn't really have any problems after switching to the Red station, after all. So it's unlikely that the issue is with a particular station color or number.

Nevertheless, it is FIRST's fault even if every single comms issue can be traced back to some specific problem with a robot. This is for the simple reason that we're playing with a FIRST mandated control system on a FIRST field, following FIRST's instructions for setting up and running on the field. All the equipment and software we use is supplied through FIRST. If they don't know this stuff well enough to troubleshoot these problems and help teams fix issues, it is entirely their fault for not doing due diligence and understanding their system. Yes, yes, a team or robot might be the cause of a particular case of comms issues, but it's inexcusable if FIRST can't tell that team how to fix the problem.

(shakes cane) Back in the day of IFI controllers, we didn't have these kinds of problems. When there were comms or controls issues, the IFI people worked the problem and solved it. The back in '07, IFI moved to new radios and teams had comms issues with them. IFI identified the problems and had FIRST post a list of fixes and solutions in a Team Update. Before the Week 1 regionals. Clearly, we have been in this situation before, only back then things got fixed because there were people available that knew the entire control system from code to chips.

The situation now is obviously different. I'm certain FIRST has experts available that know the NI hardware and software, PDB, etc. just as well as IFI knew things. I'm just as certain they don't have anyone that knows anything about our communication equipment since we're using off the shelf consumer components for that vital part of the robot. Heck, it took a FIRST team member/mentor writing a program to automate WPA programming back in '10. FIRST clearly has been treating our wifi equipment as a magic black box that should just work. It's entirely their fault for doing so, and we're seeing the results of it now.