[dlavery]

It has been said before, but given the initiation of this thread it is worth repeating:

Each of us has a finite amount of available energy. It is up to us to decide how it will be expended. You can expend significant energy whining and complaining about what is wrong with FIRST, life, the universe, and everything. Or you can re-direct that energy into finding a way to improve the situation and making something positive out of the whole experience. So, where do you want to direct your energy?

FIRST is not perfect. It is put together by a staff of human beings, who are just as under-staffed, over-stressed, under-paid, over-worked, under-appreciated, and over-committed as any robot-building team (any probably more than many). Things slip through the cracks. New technologies are in the kit of parts that are outside their areas of expertise. Demands for team support are overwhelming. Stuff is not going to happen perfectly.

Our job is to understand that, and deal with it. Don't like how the cables are set up? You can either whine about it, or you can come up with an alternative method that can be done for the same (or less) expense, test it to validate that it will work for 1000+ teams, document the full process, send it to FIRST, and then volunteer to help pack the kits next year while you oversee the implementation of the solution.

Don't like the idea of building the IR circuits yourself? You can either whine about it, or organize your entire team into an IR-circuit-assembly-line and volunteer to construct the circuit for any team that sends you the parts. You provide a service to any teams that feel overwhelmed by the task, and you can get great brownie points for service to the FIRST community!

Don't like that the RC inputs are all PWM style? You can either whine about it, or spend some time designing alternate cabling methods, document it, and publish it to all the teams as an alternative. Provide an additional service to the community of FIRST teams and locate and identify all the available cable sources across the country that can supply materials (or even finished products) for your solution, and tell all the other teams about them.

You can either suck up a lot of oxygen, or you can contribute to our communal knowledge. The choice is yours.

-dave