[Kevin Sevcik]

While it's definitely an interesting concept and would probably be more extensible than a centralized controller, it suffers from one major flaw. Almost everything we interface with the system would need to be custom-designed for FRC. I'm pretty sure any currently existing intelligent peripherals out there are going to be a hodge-podge of interface standards specific to their industry. So we face the daunting task of having to specifcy an interface standard for all of our devices and then start designing all the devices themselves, and then paying for our new incompatible-with-the-world solenoid valves to be manufactured and.... Well... I think there's a reason this paradigm is more commonly seen on cars. I don't think FIRST is big enough to handle the extra costs this would entail without ruining the extensibility by designing to 4-5 industry standards and ending up with a port for pneumatics, a port for victors, a port for spikes, and basically a port for each individual subsystem and look out if one of those ever changes.