[Tom Line]

I may reiterate what others have already said, but I want to be thorough:

I. Classmate
A. Watchdog problems are still an issue. We fixed the majority by changing powersave and bios options, but it would be nice to see this as part of the formal instructions for rookies AND veteran teams.
B. Transition times are bad between the driving account and the developer. Even worse is the boot time, and the time required to log back out then back in after being FMS locked.
C. When IN the driver station mode, the USB can be problematic. We've had multiple instances this year of it refusing to acknowledge the logitech gamepads we are using.
D. The USB is not consistent in determining the joystick order. It had a bad habit of swapping the way they are installed (when they do install).
E. The E-stop wait. Dump it. A warning sign is enough.
F. PLEASE allow us to use any laptop instead of the classmate. I can buy a $200 ebay laptop that costs less than the classmate, has a longer battery life and more processor power, can be used to program AND as the driver station, and a whole host of other things as well. We used a normal laptop during most of the beta test and never had an issue.

II. PD board.
A. It would be nice if could change to standard-size nuts rather than metric on the positve and negative leads.
B. It would be nice if the wagos could be turned to point upward, so that it isn't nearly impossible to work with them once the PD board is installed on the robot.

III. Crio
A. Power port does not have a positive enough connection to the wires.
B. A short ethernet cable and female-female connector should be mandatory as part of the robot wiring. This is what our team has been doing without issue to prevent the over-use of the crio ethernet port.

IV. Can
A. It would be nice if a can-manual or a "Can for Dummies" came along with next years instructions. This year, unless you're fairly electrically savvy, most teams shied away from Can. It opens some great possibilities....

V. The oft-maligned game adapter.
A. We hot-glued the reset button and the power button. Our robot still reset once from an extremely hard hit. Would it really be that hard to take a tiny form-factor bridge and mount it inside a cradle that fits in the crio itself? Then it could pull power from the Crio, be easily removable, etc.

B. The backup game adapter is horrid. Connection times are ridiculous. We bought one as a backup, but never used it except on the practice bot because of the start-up time. It would have made it a crunch to even set our autonomous mode on the field.

VI. Joysticks
A. I think it would be smart to substitute the commonly used logitech gamepads for the attack joysticks. The gamepads are simply more flexible (requiring only one pad for tank style drive) and are easier to transport. They also allow your drive team more flexibility in where they stand and how they move around.