[FTC]: What is the reason teams are not allowed to connect Arduino directly to NXT?

[skatefriday]

Originally Posted by Andrew Rudolph

What did you use it for?

Functional lights. Lots of teams had decorative LED light strips
this year. Our light strips gave visual feedback to the drivers
to indicate various robot states, game status, etc... e.g. Not
just pretty lights.

We had about a dozen different patterns we could display.
One of the most useful was an internal timer kept by the
NXT that tracked when the end game started and when
there was 10 seconds left in the game. So the drivers could
focus on the field and not on the clock.