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Unread 24-04-2008, 14:42
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Re: NEW 2009 Control System Released

Quote:
Originally Posted by ayeckley View Post
I'll second that! I've never been in love with NI hardware or software products (though I'm grateful for their sponsorship).

I wonder how many teams will sit 2009 out because of the steep learning curves? For teams that have four-year students and tight budgets it might make sense, which is unfortunate. Unless the system comes pre-configured with a very, very, strong set of reference VI's and some unbelieveably great documentation, I can envision a large backlash against FIRST by frustrated and upset teams in March 2009. The IFI reference code was pretty good - NI needs to top that.

I'd have loved to have a year or two to make the transisition. I can't see any technical reason that the two field control systems couldn't have operated in parallel in 2009 (cost issues aside). Better yet, it would have been great to let the market decide which system the customers (e.g. the teams) prefer. One entry fee gets you an IFI system, and a higher entry fee gets you an NI system. That would have made a great introduction to the economic realities of the engineering profession for students!

I also wonder if Kevin Watson will stay involved.
I'm afraid the financial and technical difficulties inherent in running the two systems in parallel are effectively insurmountable. Given that FIRST is still working out logistics, hardware designs, software support, and communications, I don't think you'd be able to add IFI compatibility on top of it and still have a product by kickoff 2009.....
That said, I wouldn't mind if we didn't have a product by kickoff 2009 and we had to fall back on the IFI system for one more year. To my mind, FIRST should have had a LOT of this stuff worked out already. The demonstrations at Champs should have been of prototype hardware for the initial production run, and we should have been looking at V1.0 of the software environment. Given that they announced a new control system in May 2007, and were certainly working on it before then, many of these issues should have been worked out. At the very least, they should have a solid price estimate for the system. One year into the project, apparently fully committed to the transition and they still don't know what it's going to cost? That's pretty astounding.
I'd be (moderately) happy if the control system was available around registration time this year AND FIRST shipped control systems to teams early along with the software etc. that they ship out months before the competition. We all saw the lovely results of beta testing ~15 fields with brand new scoring software and hardware AT the regionals in 2005. I really don't want to see the results of beta testing 1500 robot controllers AND field controllers during the 2009 build and competition season.
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