[FRC Blog] Radio Silence

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Also I'll add to the growing requests for a radio that boots in less than 90 seconds... This is the single biggest thing, really. I don't understand why minimizing this aspect of a radio isn't a top engineering priority.

I would say it's a top priority for our use... but for a vast majority of use cases, a boot time of 30 seconds versus one of 90 really doesn't make that much of a difference. When you're sitting at home and the power goes out and comes back, do you sit on your couch complaining that your home wifi router takes too long to reboot? And even if you do, does it happen often enough for boot time to be something you actively look for when picking your next router? Companies making routers know that most of the consumer base they're trying to attract won't really be impacted much by the boot time, and instead are looking for things those users do want - small size, strong signal, easy to set up, a nice UI, good security, customizability, etc. So all of that gets prioritized over boot time.

Besides, if it had amazing fast boot time, the engineers working on it wouldn't have any more excuses.