2009 Control System Possibility?

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Tim Skloss

We already have that... it's called FIRST Lego League ... Works great for middle schoolers who aren't ready to learn the details of electromechanical control, but misses the point for FRC.

Developing C code (albeit slowly) to make a robot with simple motor drives go straight gives the students a much deeper understanding of how things work. That is FAR more important than having a winning robot.

Insulating the students from complexity cheats them. Students who learn how their robot really works are better prepared to make the important educational choices that are in front of them at this time in their lives.

I can't disagree with this any more, at least the way this competition is structured. Let's view this from the point of my students:

1. We spend our summers fundraising to make money to be able to compete. In most cases this involves ACTUAL MANUAL LABOR, and is in addition to the work they are doing in their REAL summer jobs. $6,000 entry fee, around $3500 for robot parts/accessories, $2500 for travel, and an additional $5,000 for Championships - money doesn't grow on trees ya know, and since we've grown the Central Texas area corporations and businesses are giving less and less to each team since they're being pressured to donate to more and more teams.

2. Once we have busted our chops to make the money to be able to compete in FIRST, we're purchasing the hardware and software tools to help us build our robot within the confines of this competition.

3. Now you're telling us we're SUPPOSED to be frustrated that we can't even make a $%^@ robot drive STRAIGHT?!?! That's supposed to be something we're SUPPOSED to have problems with? A $250 LEGO Mindstorms robot now has nice little wrappers that handle all the complexities of driving straight, but because we're paying 50x as much money we're SUPPOSED to have to solve this problem out of the box OURSELVES?!? That BS.

4. Okay, now that we've given our lives and sanity to this competition, you're saying that having these frustrations is more important than winning? Why the heck even participate in the competition if your end goal isn't to win? If this competition didn't cost the average team $10,000 per year, I might be able to agree with you. But the way it's structured, anything not designed to make me more productive and making me more competitive is working against me, and I can go elsewhere and have people/things work against me for free.

I just think the whole rationale of "we gotta be as low level as possible always" is just a crock. I say give me external automatic processing for my gyro so all I ever have to do is ask what direction I'm pointing in, give me the ability to say, "Synchronize motors for XXX encoder counts", and things that cheaper systems nowadays do for me AUTOMATICALLY. Then I can write higher-level algorithms faster that do things that are actually USEFUL to me. Give me that and I'll be a more competitive team, I promise.

-Danny