Quote:
Originally posted by dez250
IFI was not created with FIRST, or in any way completely for FIRST. They were a control system that took over when the Motorola controllers were discontinued. IFI was around before they were involved with FIRST, and if you have taken a look much at their site you would might figure that out. Also FIRST has just helped them as a company succeed, and grow more. I would suggest some of you to take a look at what you type here and what you say, as this thread may be the rumor mill, but it still reflects upon your team and yourself what you say, and this board will leave lasting impressions on many if not all of us!
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You're right, what you type here reflects on you & your team, so enough with the know-it-all, condescending attitude. Even if you were right about the origins of IFI (and you aren't, it was founded by some engineers from FIRST teams as Jim & Ricky pointed out), don't assume that others haven't looked at their website or done some research into the origins of IFI.
Quote:
Originally posted by Sachiel7
(Also, a note to Wildstang, you complain about the speed of the processor, yet even with a highly significant delay, you still managed to take Nats. Think about that.)
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Us complaining about the speed of the processor & us winning nats are really independent. We were surprised that we got as much mileage out of the control system as we did and we enjoyed the challenge. We were pushing the limits of the current controller. We were dangerously close to the upper bound on program loop length, a few hundred or so more lines of code (I didn't actually calculate how close we were) and we wouldn't have executed our loop fast enough and the RC would have reset. Sure we could have offloaded more processing to another off board controller, but we had electrostatic problems with our existing processor & didn't need more problems. Besides, it's almost unrealistic to require teams without mentors with CompE & CS backgrounds to use an off board processor if they want to do anything exciting with autonomous mode. We've already heard some grumbling from teams who think it's unfair to use an off board processor just because their teams don't have experienced mentors. If FIRST wants a majority of teams to progress beyond dead reckoning in autonomous mode they have to give us a processor with more power. Many teams in 2003 could have come up with awesome autonomous programs, but they were limited by the speed & memory constraints of the current controller so they stuck with dead or rotation counting. And if FIRST wants the more experienced teams to continue to push the envelope of what's possible in autonomous mode they'd better give us a controller that's capable of accomplishing more.
Quote:
Originally posted by Sachiel7
Why, when they just developed a system to function autonomously, with the multi-slot programming, would they just scrap all that?
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This isn't true. The 2003 controller was pretty much the same as all previous controllers. The old ones had multi-slot programming, we actually used 4 slots in 2002 (and 6 in 2003). And when we loaded our 2003 code onto previous year's RCs - I believe we used the 2001 controller on our prototype bot - we didn't have any problems, even in autonomous mode.
Mike