[techhelpbb]

I split this because it's not essential to my posts above:

Several times on this forum and elsewhere I've seen calls for a more integrated control system. One advantage being to reduce the number of failure points within that control system that the students and robot designs themselves can contribute to. Essentially make one brick to swap out.

FIRST has within it's capability to dramatically reduce the points in the control system, regardless of the existing number of points to monitor, that can induce issues that amount to power quality issues. At the moment they've focused on field monitoring and while that's essential to the whole communications argument, field monitoring does little or even nothing for the longer standing issues of the power quality on the robot.

I encourage FIRST to not redesign the control system into something where the students make FRC like FLL (Lego NXT). I realize that FIRST doesn't want to make the electronics skill required to build the robot too high. On the other hand the design and deployment safety mechanisms they put in place to mitigate the electronics engineering skill issue has perversely made the robot power quality issues much harder, sometimes near impossible, to deal with. We need more monitoring on the robots at all times to remove power quality issues, either at our choice, or built into the control system like the battery monitor.

FIRST needs to find a happy balance.