2006 Season - The Negative

[Donut]

Originally Posted by eugenebrooks

I'll second that, Tim!

The 8722 in the 2006 controller has a very long errata sheet, so long, in fact, that it is clear that all of the errata have not yet been found. There are a number of teams that have software that simply does not work reliably on the 2006 controller and I think that it would behoove IFI to either back up to the 8520 chip that was supplied for the 2005 competition year, or use these teams to test a new chip revision for the 2007 controller during the off season until it gets a clean bill of health. We have gremlins on the 8722 based controller that were not fixed by patches, although the 8.2 battery voltage "indicator of death" did evaporate.

This was a major headache for us. We really don't want to be using the 8722 next year, unless the errata, including those not found yet, evaporate. We would much rather be writing software that chases the green light, then the red light, then the blue light...

We would happily pay IFI $120 to "down grade" our 2006 controller to the same chip used in the 2005 controller as the cost of the solding equipment required to change out the nine dollar part exceeds $120. Past using the 2006 controller for comparison purposes for a "fixed" 2007 controller, we won't be using it in the future because of its gremlins.

So, if anyone from IFI is reading this thread, could you please give serious consideration to dropping back to the 8520 PIC chip in 2007? Team 1280 would be happy to beta test the 8722 until its gremlins are cleaned out, but actually attempting to use on a competition robot in 2007 is not a very good option for us.

Eugene

I really think this was a hit or miss problem. I think we had the indicator-of-death happen once to us, but other than that had no problems with this year's RC at all, and would not have been able to use our program this year on last year's RC (we only used 2 sensors, a gyro and the camera, and we still used a little over 1/3 our code space. We completely obliterated the limit last year with the camera code).

I would like to see them fix the problems, but would be willing to risk having them to keep this processor around. Simply put, most teams will not get the camera working on a less-powerful unit.