[miketwalker]

I agree that the basic stamp chip is getting outdated. With autonomous mode, we overcame some of the problems with timers eventually, but it was a pain. I think we can continue to work with this, but I noticed when working with lots of other teams that sometimes people overthink their functions and make their code super long and use many more variables then they truly need. I think that's mainly the problem, not just the chip. One overcome of the timer problem I noticed with SPAM was for distance to put a switch that gets clicked every however many inches and you can use that so that if boxes stop you or anything happens you'll keep pushing till you go the same distance, I think that overcomes the problems many teams have run into. Maybe more types of sensors (opticals were a great addition last year in my opinion) would make it so robots can do more. Then we might need more variable space, but teams would have a challenge to develop more of a system to work more with the sensors than the timer. There were many methods I've noticed of overcoming some of the issues with the basic stamp chip, and I think we just need to focus more on other methods, that's what FIRST is all about, looking at the challenge and setting off to find a solution, seeing how other teams do it, using that and making a better code the next year. This year they threw us into the deep end of a pool and short circuited many teams *pun intended* but next year we'll know what's coming and in the offseason can breadboard systems and work with them to perform different operations. I think that's a better way then to make it 'simpler coding' because your still challenged and teams are more diverse, and overall makes the competition more interesting.