[Jim Giacchi]

In 2001 as a (High School) Sophomore I decided to teach myself the control system. I took home the new system with a motor and a battery and withing an hour had everything setup using radios, to make the motor spin back and forth. Latter that season I wrote the code for the robot because no one else wanted to and did so by downloading and installing the several megabyte program (I'm pretty sure I may have even copied it on a floppy disk, yes I am that old, I also built my robots using candle light and hot wax burns!!!).

In 2009 - 2010 as a graduated and employed Mechanical Engineer who works everyday on robots I attempted, and I stress attempted to get the control system to work. I failed miserably, giving up in frustration and turning it back over to the electrical advisor telling him to fix it because I just didn't care anymore.

The funny thing is that our robots are the same complexity as what I did in 2001, they are no more complicated, but in order to get them up and running the control system is orders of magnitude more complicated and the compiler takes multiple DVDs (Thats gigabytes, with a big old capital G) God help us when our computer crashed last year halfway through the season, took the students and mentor over a week to get it back up and fully updated.

So basically what I am saying is Please.... Please I beg you and wholeheartedly agree with the others who have posted that it needs to be less complicated and easier to setup. The metric should be, can a student get this running on their own. I understand that they may not be, can the student get this to use a camera, pick out a shape and have the robot do a backflip frisbee throw into the top goal in autonomous, but a student should within an afterschool meeting get a robot to drive from start to finish. Right now the system is not even close to that.

Spending time troubleshooting something this complicated always eats away at the fun I have working on this and I have longed for the days of that beautiful black IFI box, oh how i miss thee (and it's not the IFI part, it's the simplicity)

Thanks for reading my book of a post,
Jim