[techhelpbb]

Just a little something I'd like to put out there:

Taking risk is what encourages people to sell products. If your market must have zero chance of issue before any financial or morale return can be made you'll discourage innovation and you'll leave yourself with a small number of choices. Eventually that drives up cost artificially.

Yes - MindSensors decided to make a change in their design. The Jaguars in the past made changes in their design. That's nothing actually new and the Jaguar manufacturing resources took much longer to do it.

FIRST doesn't really let you build your own control systems for competition use. They let you change out modules. Even though my team (FRC11) gave me all their old Jaguars after a bad experience - I as the CSA at several competitions simply took note of these controllers and the experience each team had with them. If you put the time in you could make the Jaguars work - how much time was really up to your team's resources to approach the issues. Even the change MindSensors made addresses a situation which may or may not be a deal breaking issue. I mean they did drive an FRC size robot around with these original controllers and it did move - plenty of people never got that far with the Jaguars.

It should be up to the individuals where there comfort level stands and why. FIRST obviously realizes not every team has the resources to take any risk at all - and for those teams this practice of tightly controlling the control system components is advantageous. It also stops teams from trying to build entirely unique controls in just 6 weeks and then having weird problems with no standards for the FTA/FTAA/CSA to help hunt down to keep the competition playing.

So there's give and take here. I hope the community has some patience with these new guys so they can sort any issues out and polish their work till it represents the best possible outcome. I bought both Sparks and SD540 and I have no regrets because in my particular situation $100 of both was a small price to increase the market diversity.

I write this not because of my trivial investment or any involvement with these companies. I write this because I've put give or take 20 years into FIRST FRC and I personally would rather see some small controlled risk of issues that get addressed than a lock-out that drives not just cost but limitations to the very cool diversity that FRC frequently demonstrates. This isn't FLL. This is high school level and by now as we teach STEM I should hope we can drive metric driven decisions and independent thought.