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I can't imagine I'll make this any better by opening my big mouth, but I'm going to do it anyways.
Team 824, I'm sorry for your tragedy. I'd feel just as awful if my work suddenly had little importance. I don't think I'd be quite so vocal about it, however. You noticed that it was 3 weeks in, eh? Well, I posted the question in the first week, I believe. They shuffled it around 4 times before answering it. I even got an email from the FIRST moderator asking me to re-post it because it had been lost. Also, from discussions here on the delphi forums (and one or more replies to my FIRST forum post), I know I wasn't the only person pushing for this rules change. During the two weeks or so that I was waiting for a reply (I was expecting a "no"), I was working on alternative method of communication probably similar to the one your team came up with. Knowing that an answer from FIRST was in the works, I held back on implementing my design (much to the dismay of my coaches). Luckily, my instinct had been right even though I'd been expecting a "no" answer.
The only reason I knew to even suggest this option was some work I did for the government over the summer... I suspect it isn't common knowledge that a Stamp has that capability. I'd been told by IFI itself that serial communication with the RC was impossible!
Now, if you can pull off 19.2kbps through the programming port, you've definately still got some tricks up your sleeve, since the top baud of a stamp is 9600bps.
That bit you wrote about "any old team that didn't even care enough to get started yet on building an advanced control system can jump right in and be up and running in a day" bothers me very much. While you were tackling the problem one way, others of us were dreaming up alternate solutions. That's what engineering is all about.
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-Ryan
"You're not a real programmer until you end all your sentences with semicolons;"
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