A request for change to next years Innovation FIRST control board/system.

[KenWittlief]

personally I like the serial link - the SW you need to program the bot can run very well on an old Pentium Thinkpad, or lots of other old laptops that can be purchased on ebay for $100 or less

I think its much easier for FIRST teams to have a few old Thinkpads floating around that students can take home to work on the code - and if one gets lost or broken you are out $100

than to buy the team a couple $1500 state of the art notebooks, that will compile your SW 60 seconds faster than a 233MHz pentium.

in fact, for the cost of a USB=> RS232 adapter you could probabally get an old laptop that would work just fine.