What Dr Joe Wants for Christmas...

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

A looping serial bus would kill those teams that have trouble with the PWMs now. One wire would kill their whole robot, potentially.

It should be possible to do the "looping" at the RC if that is a concern. Instead of PWMs 1-16 we have now there could just be 16 (or whatever number is reasonable) bus taps. That would allow flexibility to wire either in a daisy-chain or star configuration or a combination of both (as I suspect would be most useful).

Originally Posted by billbo911

There a MANY teams that have difficulty with what FIRST has provided already. Completely changing the design will require some phase in time, maybe in the order of years.

Definitely a concern, but how big of a change would it be, really? I suspect if something like this were attempted, the speed controller by default could be programmed to react basically the same as today's Victors. Thus, the only real change would be in the way they are wired to the RC, but as I said even that could be minimized. This seems potentially much less disruptive than the move from PBASIC to C for the RC (which I thought would really hurt many teams, however it appears the impact was negligible).