[Brandon Holley]

The "system" (FMS, robots, programming languages, vision processing, CAN, etc) is very complicated, and needs to be respected as Evan stated. We have a natural tendency to draw conclusions by process of elimination, ie: if its not this thing it MUST be this other thing. With complex systems, this technique tends to not work as desired and in our case leaves people feeling helpless. I totally agree with Evan in that just saying to a team "its your robot" is an absolute disservice. It very well might be their robot, in fact 95% of the time it probably is their robot.

However, we as a community and FIRST as an organization have a duty to help get teams working correctly. We (FIRST and its community) have a duty to educate people wherever we can and to help bring people up to speed with this system and how to troubleshoot it. Do you think every team knows that their 30fps camera is bogging down the entire field? In my experience the answer is an overwhelming NO. This is the system FIRST has chosen for all teams, so its on their shoulders to help make this education possible (and have done a decent job as time has progressed with it.)


All that being said, cries of "FMS is messing up our robot!!" may be shortsighted, but are not always unfounded. This all stems from the fallout of Einstein and the investigation that followed. We must stress patience on BOTH sides (volunteers and teams) and understand we all have one common goal: to get every robot running through FMS on the field flawlessly. How the robot performs is up to the individual team obviously, but we all need to work to get teams operational at events.

-Brando