From the few who responded, I take it that a full blown serialized system is not wanted. The more I think about it the cost and amount of resources it would take to develop the system all at once in the time frame First has committed to would not be a good idea. However, I believe this is the future judging by the products being brought to market in the industrial process, automotive, and automated building markets. I strongly hope the designers do not boxes us in for the future by ignoring serial communications ability. I'd like to see a SPI port and an I2C port. RS 232 and RS485 support also apply to many devices. The can and other busses are a little more complicated to provide for. If the designers leave the controller extensible, there is the option for change. we will not see the controller till 09 and a 4 or five year life would be nice. Things are changing fast. What may seam over kill and not applicable to FIRST now may be very desirable in a couple years.
To scale it down a little, what could you do with these servos on a vex platform that you can't do with the VEX servos and hobby PWM.
http://www.crustcrawler.com/motors/A...ex.php?prod=63
In 2007 our team first loaded our code into the bot on ship day as we were fixing the crate. We finished building the robot on Thursday and spent half the matches Friday debugging everything. Still I'm very proud of our team. We built a robot under less than desirable circumstances and competed. If anything I posted lead to a more complicated system, I think my team would string me up. Easy-C is nice.