[PatJameson]

While this would probably be the most epic thing I would watch in my life thus far, there are a few problems that I see:

One, if FIRST claims to have "solved" a problem with the FMS/whatever else could be wrong and the robots work completely fine in this proposed competition, FIRST may lay back and claim it fine, when it still may not be. The huge problem with fixing this problem is that the problems are intermittent. Anyone with a programming background of some sort will tell you that intermittent problems that you can not reproduce in a controlled environment are hell to solve in a decently large system such as the FMS and robot code base.

Two, the problem may not be able to be solved in 8 weeks. If 4 weeks in, FIRST discovers that the FMS code is so unusable at this point that it just needs a complete rewrite, it will take months to complete. Could it be completed before competition season? Of course. But not 4-8 weeks.

I believe a decent way to aid in solving this problem is to have FIRST open source everything. In our community of Graciously Professional students, mentors, engineers, etc., flaws in the system could be found and solved pretty quickly. Then the community and FIRST would just have to look at hardware failures as the second possible source.

With this open sourcing idea, teams may even be able to aid in creating better diagnostics tools on both the robot and FMS side of things.