[eugenebrooks]

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<R71> Unaltered software modules developed during prior competitions may not be directly re-used. Just as designs for hardware COMPONENTS may be reused from one year to the next, software algorithms and designs may be reused. However, the specific lines of code must be customized for each robot each year.
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Last year, we had to cease work on code "actually used in the robot" except for the build period, the fix-it windows, and the competitions. Module re-use from prior years was allowed. Questions were asked about this and it came down to re-typing any code what had been written outside of the appropriate time window, during an appropriate time window. The customization rule is new and has a potential downside impact depending on how you interpret it.

Re-use of code is more similar to re-use of a hardware design than it is to re-use of a hardware component, for example within the current rules it is perfectly fine for you to re-use a CNC program to produce a custom hardware component from year to year. The CNC program is in fact, software. You are taking advantage of software developed during a prior year to make the part, just as is the case when using a module from a prior year, our an outside source, when building your robot program.

The clear intent of FIRST is that work on custom robot code is performed during the appropriate time windows, but I do not think that FIRST intends to keep teams from using the code that is provided by Kevin Watson, or others who labor to provide FIRST teams with useful software modules. It can be quite unsafe to customize some of this code.

I spend quite a bit of effort documenting programming methods useful on FIRST robots. I have also provided code modules that are useful to enable teams to safely deal with the hazards involved for functionality that uses interrupts, the protections against these hazards being carefully tucked away in interface routines for wheel counters, gyro integrals, and so forth.

I hope that the customization rule does not cause programmers to customize the posted code in a manner that might get caught up in some of these hazards. Re-writing some of this code using expressions that seem to be equivalent can, in fact, run afoul of interrupt hazards and this could lead to unsafe robots, the code of which needs to trust the values returned by the access routines.

Perhaps the solution is to declare these code modules "standard software parts" for competition robots, and offer them for sale as software vendor. If that is the case, I'll offer them for the princely fee of $0. It is clear that teams can get as many copies as they want, as often as they want, whenever they want.

Yes, I think that we all should do that and rejoice in our efforts to help level the playing field...

Eugene