KOP Contest (Cash Prizes for FRC teams)

[Kevin Sevcik]

I suspect some people might be interested in languages that are a little more generally applicable and not so tightly bound to a specific vendor's hardware. And from a pedagogical standpoint, Labview hides a lot of details that are important for a budding computer scientist to learn. It's certainly useful for many things, but it's not a great stepping stone to any other programming languages.

Also, could we please, please not do the iPhone car thing? As I've ranted elsewhere, it's very, very difficult to do that safely with the FRC Control System. You need to think long and hard about fail safe mechanisms and how your actuators will react to a loss of communications or power. Personally, I'd really hate to read about an FRC team losing someone due to a run away cRIO controlled car.

Basically, whatever you're planning, ask yourself if your FRC bot has ever done something completely unexpected that you don't understand, and then ask yourself how bad it'd be if your offseason project did that.