[Doug Leppard]

It is always nice to have a new controller to play with. When I got started as a mentor with FIRST in 2003 it was the first year of autonomous. The processor was a pig (no pun intended) and it couldn't do encoders, we had to build our own pre-processor to process the encoders and pass data to the FIRST processor. 2004 changed all that.

I am glad FIRST is staying up with the times. But I have concerns mostly along the price range. The Best thing about 2008 is that you could use a vex to practice things and they were close enough and cheap.

No way as a mentor can I afford to go out and buy the new system. Big question how are we going to get these systems into the kid’s hands?

How much will the FLL and FTC kits cost?

As far as power, most teams can not even take advantage of the 2008 processor. Even at Atlanta there were many teams that could not do any autonomous and most teams only doing 1-2 lines. We helped many teams to do a basic autonomous mode.

I am sure this new processor will have software that will make it easier for inexperienced teams to do more. But also it has so much power that the power teams can do so much more and thus will leave the weaker teams even further behind.

Bottom line my main concern is the cost of the new system, with something cheaper FIRST could get more of them into the hands of more people to learn from one another.

Just some thoughts.

But I am excited, once we get it you know we will work hard to maximize it.