[EricH]

Originally Posted by Taggerun

One last question how do I connect the 09' DS to the robot??

Grab a Classmate, make sure that the robot's cRIO and the Classmate are running compatible software from any year between '10 and '14, and follow those instructions as far as radios. Send the blue box to the "scrap parts" bin. You don't need the blue box to talk to the cRIO. That's why the Classmate was used starting in 2010 (though many teams tossed that too, once the computer restrictions were opened up). Yes, it's an interesting challenge. But doing it is probably going to require locating the '09 cRIO firmware versions, as that particular DS wasn't used past that year, at all.

As was touched on, there were a large number of issues with that little blue box, as nice as it was in terms of size. The biggest one is that every single one of them had to be fitted with a grounding cable after Week 1 events to deal with static discharge, er, taking the path of greatest damage.