The communication tides are shifting...

[Skinkworks]

My team's robot (3142) has never had connection problems. A lot of you are saying the control system dropped your team's connection multiple times, but did anyone here do FTC last year with Samantha? Rankings in FTC were largely determined by how many times your robot worked, because no one's robot worked more than 80% of the time. You don't realize how well the FRC FCS works.

I think what FRC has to do with the control system next year is give themselves a large amount of headroom on the bandwidth, and allow use of a more expensive, more reliable radio, along with an inexpensive option for all these new Boys and Girls Club teams. FRC could also take a radio and put an alternate firmware on it (dd-wrt), use QoS for FCS messages, and throttle bandwidth on accessory streams. This could also make flashing the radio quicker, since FIRST controls the protocol.

Also, a lot of control problems could be team-related, as impossible as that seems. Going back to FTC (experiencing a similar problem), my team had constant connection issues last year. This year, my team got a new Samantha, a new brick, new code, a new RobotC version, and there was a new FCS. The only shared factor between the two seasons was me, the programmer. My team still had connection issues. It has to be me, somehow, because most other teams had much fewer connection problems. Multiple people looked at my code, and couldn't see a problem. Yes, FTC is not FRC, but parallels can be drawn.