Lesson Learned: The Negative

[Qbranch]

I don't think there's much that has to be written here, but I do have a couple little things.

On this first one, I'll speak from personal experience to avoid getting details wrong with somebody else. Sometimes, Contact Inside of the Bumper Zone was called on our machine when it was being stuck against a wall by a defensive robot. I guess it looked like we were poking their robot because whenever their robot would move, ours would move... but we really couldn't go anywhere. Just seems like a hard rule to call/not call.

Also, FIRST said at Atlanta that they will not be incresing the weight limit on machines to allow for the new control system, which, by the way, weighs about five pounds. As many of you know from having morbidly obese robots and lightening them in the past, five pounds is a LOT of material to lose.

The control system's a whole nother story, but it will be interesting to see what part of the new control system programmers actually get to write software for. I'm really hoping that there are gates left over in the FPGA for teams to write crazy awesome software for (like, my personal favorite, an insanely fast quadrature encoder decoder to enable use of high count encoders).

-q