The Issac32 vs the 2004 RC

[Venkatesh]

Hello everybody,

Now that the 2004 season is comfortably past, I would like to bring up the new Robot Controller. It was one of the biggest changes from past years, and it was meant to be an improvement over the legacy system.

Last year, many teams which chose to operate autonomously had to create all sorts of kludges to achieve real-time or near real-time signal processing. People experimented with auxiliary processors, large custom circuits, etc. All of this was to overcome the limitations of the 2003 Issac32 RC. This year, almost all the electronics "firepower" was contained within the 2004 RC. The PIC is far more powerful than the BS2sx was, and I didn't hear very much about custom circuitry this year. I only noticed a lot more software magic.

One thing I did note was the overall performance of robots this year versus last. There were no major differences that I heard about. The new controller didn't seem to have enabled all new and wonderous autonomous systems or feedback loops. All I saw was last year's abilities (sometimes less than that) repeated.

To all the programmers and electricians out there, do you think that the new controller was worth it?