2015 RoboRIO/Control System Feedback

[Jared]

Overall, the new system was a huge improvement.

Things I didn't like:

-MATCHES ARE NEVER THE RIGHT LENGTH OR EVEN THE SAME LENGTH. Seriously, most teleop periods are three seconds too long, but every now and then, we get a 2:15 teleop.

-Timertasks don't work properly if they are started before connecting to the driver station, but work if the reset button is pushed on the roboRIO. Troubleshooting this behavior is difficult, and it's never comforting when resetting or redeploying code puts the controller in a different state than a cold boot.

-Java timertask timing is worse than in previous years.

-It takes forever for robots to connect to the field.
-It takes forever for robots to connect to the driver station laptop after a match.
-Many of the workarounds and best practices to make these go faster (changing team number, restarting mDNS service, not having other stuff open...) aren't published anywhere.

-The log viewer was never released for the power board.

-Default joystick values used when a joystick is disconnected don't always make sense.

Good things
-WPIlib remained mostly the same
-Getting rid of CommandBase and putting the instances of Subsystems in Robot is a great change
-Toggle when pressed methods on Buttons is really useful.
-Loading code is much faster in Java, which is really nice for debugging
-The debugger works over an ethernet connection, which is awesome.

-The smaller size and weight is a huge benefit to teams.

-Current monitoring is an awesome feature to protect mechanisms from damaging themselves.