[Tom Line]

IFI is gone. I'm not going to pine over them going. However, I will point out as others have before me that the difficulty of using and setting up that control system is being vasty over-stated. As a rookie team in 2006, our control system worked just fine. As a 2nd year team, we utilized the camera quite well. With 1 mechanical engineer who hadn't programmed in 10 years and 3 students who had never had a formal programming class.

As a comparison, we missed a portion of our first competition because the labview installation on our computer corrupted itself and C-Rio wouldn't accept an image. 4 hours of the labview technician working on it while talking to tech support didn't fix it - a new computer did. That never happened with that antiquated old IFI system - it just 'worked'.

That said, I'm both excited and concerned about the new system.

Excitement:
1. The battery will be an incredibly welcome addition.
2. More durable ethernet ports (cost us matches last year) is wonderful
3. Static discharge protection
4. It's a laptop - the feedback will be wonderful on the screen for programming, and the input opportunities may be endless.

Concerns:
1. Potential to run XP: what could one trojan or virus do the network?
2. Durability
3. If it's running linux, and a drive goes bad... how many teams are going to be able to get a new drive, reinstall?
4. Cost. Stolen, stepped on, broken hinges, etc etc etc. Laptops get beat up. What is the cost, since I can almost guarantee this will be one of the future items we're expect to 'keep' for the control system. I just checked online and the classmate costs $500.
5. Complexity. How many things can go wrong with a computer? 'nuff said.

Of all these, Cost is probably my biggest worry. This laptop is going to get the snot kicked out of it (literally). Ethernet port, usb ports, screen hinges, powersupply port (big one).

We'll see. I think this has the potential for being an improvement over last year's system, even if it doesn't beat IFI hands down.