2009 Control System Possibility?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

I just think the whole rationale of "we gotta be as low level as possible always" is just a crock.

I totally agree with this statement. While learning about low level integration is probably beneficial, I don't think its place is in a high school competition. I programmed my teams robot for 3 years in high school and I cannot tell you how many times I got bit in the butt by some hardware nuance. It took 3 years of experience between two high schoolers to get a 80% of the time working autonomous mode in 2006.

Now I learned how to code in C pretty well, but any monkey can write code. What I learned that was much more important was the high level control law theory, which had implications on my decisions for college. I am willing to argue that high level concepts and implementations are what we should be pushing students in FRC to learn.

In FRC now, I see a bunch of teams who have decent mechanical systems and module level code written, but no glue to hold them all together. If we can start pushing interfaces rather than low level implementations, we get two birds with one stone. (Software design experience and competitive robots). This is the same argument I used with my team for buying AndyMark shifters over using our own. Yeah, sure, we can spend a lot of time designing an OK gearbox, but we can also spend less time designing a ROCK SOLID interface for the AM gearbox, and then focus more time on other functions and practice. Which seems better to you?