[mathking]

I wasn't going to jump into the side debate of using VEX or the old IFI system, but here goes. To preface this, I love the VEX system. I have had one of my own since they came out. I have just over a dozen kits of various ages (including four that are less than three months old) in my classroom, and they get used. We have not done VEX competition as a team, but have been to them as a volunteer and a spectator. I really like VEX. And if we used the VEX system some teams would not see a huge difference in their robot capability. And many teams would see an order of magnitude drop. The VEX system, and the old IFI controllers, are not as powerful or versatile as the cRIO.

As someone who spends a good amount of time teaching kids to program robots, with experience with the current FRC control system, the old IFI system, VEX, Tetrix, BOEBots, Ridgesoft robots and a few other systems, I prefer VEX if I am going to teach the kids so that they can quickly create their own robots. And I greatly prefer using the cRIO if the robot is going to have an autonomous mode that will do something meaningful in 15 seconds and have as many motors and sensors as our robot had this year. We tried this fall to get last year's robot to run using VEX controls, and when we got to three microcontrollers in order to make it work I gave up. And the old IFI system I found harder to use and less powerful. Also, I will admit I have never seen anything quite like the finals happen under the old IFI system or at a VEX competition. But I have seen FRC competition delayed for hours when using the old IFI system. Not because of their system per se but because of how the field management was set up. If VEX competitions had 140-150 pound robots racing around at the rate of speed of FRC robots, they would need a more complex field management system to insure the safety of the people and field. And it might well be prone to significantly more problems.