[DampRobot]

As a mechanical guy, I hope my comments aren't misplaced. I guess that I'm more of a "user" than most people on this thread, which for a normal product would be considered "developers."

First, I really have to thank the NI team. They've made my job a ton easier. The C-RIO/DSC setup was honestly quite cumbersome and took up a lot of space. Not just electronics board space, but also vertical space. Their CAD models were very complex, and added a ton of time to our CAD model rebuilds. So, replacing the two larger components with a smaller, flatter, simpler controller with logical mounting holes is awesome all around. I always wondered why the DSC and C-Rio needed to be separate, and this is a great answer to that question.

If the radio and it's power adapter could be integrated into the robotRIO, that would be a huge plus too.

Boot times aren't a huge deal for me. A few times when we're racing to get to queuing, and we have to re-deploy code, that extra time makes me sweat. But for most of the time, I hardly notice it. Maybe it's a bigger deal for the programmers, who have to develop with it, but I always assumed that they could just use the time when code was comping or the robot was booting to check CD or something.

I don't love the cost, but see the robotRIO as the same as expensive mechanical components. You can easily drop as much as the robotRIO just on decent drive gearboxes every season, and hardly anyone complains about those costs. It shouldn't be a huge deal to buy a new robotRIO every season, if you want to keep old robots running that is.

The robotRIO is overpowered (in my humble opinion). However, teams will always end up using all of an available resource when they think it could possible benefit them (CPU speed, memory, robot weight, height, motor number, etc.). Lots of teams will continue to see 100% CPU usage with the robotRIO just as they did with the C-RIO. Also, a ton of teams seem to believe that complex image processing is necessary on every robot, when in reality, 95% of teams don't or shouldn't focus on vision processing.

Good job, NI. Lower costs and faster boot times are always welcome, but in my mind, given how good of a product this is for me, I don't really care.