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Originally Posted by Adam Y.
That's not what FIRST is about. It may be how your car works in real life but it isn't the ideal way to introduce kids to programming because embedded systems needs a hefty understanding of electrical engineering.
As yoyodyne clearly shows the split was exasperbated by the old system as well.
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We have a wide spectrum of programming abilities and experience as I would assume is the case for most teams. In some cases previous experience came from FLL and FTC and in others it has been from their own development activities including of all things Gamemaker which is a pretty good introduction to OO methodology. There has always been the option to program graphically but our experience was that the students that were interested in Kevin’s code were able to take that knowledge and develop their own microcontroller projects some for the robot and some for themselves. I don’t think the teams are going to get the VxWorks source and probably not the BSP source so the opportunity to learn at this level through the FRC RC has been taken away. You don’t need to understand anything about electrical engineering to read a micro-controller data sheet and learn from example how to service interrupts and use integer math so you don’t need a 32 bit processor to run PID loops for instance.
Is what you are saying that the split with the old system was mostly in capability while the split for the new system will be financial? From my perspective there will always be a capability split due to the difference in engineer/mentor availability. The teams that were relatively strong with the old system will also be relatively strong with the new system but now, only the well financed teams will be able to buy more than two? control systems.