[Abrakadabra]

Jared and Joe:

I want to thank you guys for taking the high road and pointing out all the obvious advantages that this new DS system has over anything that has come before.

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It is amazing to me how some people on this thread are reacting so negatively to change. Not just this year, but even last year, where the benefits of the new control system were even more obvious, it was the same folks making the same complaints. And again, they were generally doing all their griping before all the details were known.

It is even more amazing to me that these people represent teams that have built their reputation on building state-of-the-art, cutting edge robots. Honestly, I really have to wonder how much better these teams might be if they didn't have to deal with so much negativity in their midst.

Sorry guys, but requiring today's students to have an understanding of assembly language, or knowing how to build their own outboard processor, much less how to cram an image processing algorithm into 4K of RAM, is just not going to cut it anymore. I applaud FIRST for making a such a valiant effort to provide us with the latest technology, and at a reasonable price.

</soapbox>

PS - I'm with Jared on the software - that picture doesn't look like LabView to me. I'm betting it's a simple window system running on some sort of stripped-down Linux distro. I'm also betting that for safety (as well as a bunch of other) reasons, we may not have a whole lot of leeway to modify the DS software itself. Possibly a binary library with a published API for panel customization. But we shall see soon enough...