[Greg McKaskle]

No need to ask for forgiveness, blunt is fine. An important part of Klingon culture, isn't it.

I graduated before FRC existed, and have not been a mentor, not yet anyway. My involvement with building robots has been on the demo units to demonstrate how the cRIO, I/O modules, and 802.11 can be used to build a robot. Over the past year, that adds up to three robots. I was primarily involved in the SW end. As is typical, that means that a week or two before show time, the HW is starting to get stable and you learn that plenty of design assumptions are out the window. The SW must adapt to the actual HW and sensor conditions, and modular design is one of the best tools to adapting to changing circumstances, IMO. By the way, I'm in no way trying to take credit for single-handedly building three robots, this would definitely not have happened without a seasoned FRC mentor, Joe Hershberger, and a number of other enthusiastic engineers.

For tinkering, if you only intend to read joysticks and control motors, Brad has already designed nice modules. If you want to take input from other sensors, and tune the system, I think it is nice to keep things modular, and avoid having P set in the vision section, I set in the joystick section, and D set -- hopefully -- somewhere before it is used -- "doesn't the gyro affect D"? Plus, anything we produce should be modular, even if the implementation in the FRC bots isn't.

I don't think that you will spend lots of time making speedometers and PID work. More complex sensors, vision in particular, do require new engineering. There is no PID hammer that handles all vision issues. Doing it only when you have access to the robot limits the time to evaluate alternate processing schemes. Thus my belief that PC and portable code development are good things, even in FRC. Also, don't assume that the predefined control system is closed and limited. We think it is highly modifiable, even if the FPGA is currently closed.

As for terminology. I apologize for the acronym soup that NI spews. Every industry does it, and we absorb a little from each of those industries. To make matters worse, LabVIEW has multiple meanings. Technically, LabVIEW is a product name, and another name was invented for the langauge -- G. In reality, few people use that name, and the comp.lang newsgroup is comp.lang.labview, not comp.lang.G. So don't let that confuse you.

I think I understand your concerns with the new system. You have indeed been kept in the dark. This isn't Brads decision, and it isn't mine either. I'm not really a fan of tadah moments. I'll be much more comfortable when people have access to the entire system and we can respond to demonstrated deficiencies in the system rather than FUD caused by an information vacuum.

Greg McKaskle