[RyanN]

I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that I'm happy with FIRST moving to newer, better things. Here's the reasons.

1. IFI was going downhill fast from the 2005 to the 2008 season, and hit rock bottom in 2008 with their flaky, bulky radios that did not improve anything.

2. The IFI Radios. The change to the crappy radios was due to the parts being used being too old. So they created something bigger? Umm... bad design flaw to have technology get bigger. The radios that year were also dangerous. Remember when there was a brief delay when you would disable the robot, and before it would actually disable itself? Yea, we hit a few walls pretty bad. That wall could have been some kids at a demonstration.

2. IFI's Victors seemed to be crappy out a lot more often than in previous years. We're still rocking hard with the old old 883's but hardly have any 884's because they all self destruct. Yea... metal shavings will do that, but still, they should have more protection like the Jaguars. (and yea, the Jaguars this were weren't that great, but I liked them better than the 884's.

3. The IFI RC has no real world application. The cRIO does.

4. The cRIO is so much faster, has so much more memory, and does so much more than the IFI RC. It's new and it's going to take some time to get used to, but once we release its full potential, we will have some really complex and amazing machines. The limits of the IFI RC were far exceeded and teams struggled with things such as using the camera, PID loops, and floating point. That's not so much of an issue now.

5. LabVIEW. I have come to love LabVIEW. It really does make things so much faster to get working right the first time. It's also really easy to follow and understand.

2009 was really a beta year for the new system. Nothing really complex was needed from the robots this year. FIRST and its teams were able to tread into uncharted waters to learn new things. Wait until 2010!

There is so much potential for this new system. It's reliability should be really high. We're using the cRIO which is used pretty much everywhere in industry as a reliable controller. We're using IEEE approved wireless interfaces, and also industry trusts this in offices and everyone knows that servers talk through the same stuff that were using to talk to our robots.

I say give it a few years, and we'll all never want to go back to IFI. New things need some time to adjust to. We just have so much change that it may take a while longer.