NEW 2009 Control System Released

[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

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I think a lot of this angst and annoyance could have been taken care of if this system was closer to a prototype of the system going out to teams and farther from a demo piece put together by NI to sell us on the system. I know I would have been fine with more man hours spent on these TBD features and less man-hours spent on a pretty holonomic robot with a sponge canon and flashy interface that still on bears a resemblance to the environment and hardware we'll be working with.

FWIW, to reiterate what Art said, the holonomic robot was worked on almost entirely by people with very limited software background. The only software effort/resources put into it was the holonmic class for WPILib - which also meant that work was going into the other classes that it uses - Drive, Motor, Gyro, Joystick, etc, which are all valid effort for the final product.

I'm pretty sure some of these 'TBD' features are in a far more developed state than you are giving them credit for - but if you saw them now and then a feature was removed from the final product, everyone would be complaining.

Also - 4 years ago when we switched to the PIC system, weren't we not given any information about it until September or October when the EDU controller was announced? Who knows what state it was in in April.

I by no means think that the community should just sit quite and wait until they have all the information - I'm sure some very valid points will be brought up between now and whenever 'then' is - but just keep in mind that 'TBD' doesn't mean no one has thought about it and it isn't 90% done, it just means they don't want to announce it to the public yet.

[Mike Mahar]

It seems to me that this is a three step process:
1. Guess how the new system is going to work based on limited information.
2. Find a flaw in the system based on the guess.
3. Complain about the flaw.

Of course, I'm worried too that the interface logic in the FPGA isn't going to work the way that I'd like it to and I won't be able to do some of the things that I'd like to do. However, if the system FIRST provides is truely inadequate than no one will be able to build a robot for next year's challenge. I seriously doubt that that will happen.

There may be updates to the FPGA as bugs are found. Updating the FPGA probably won't be as slow as some fear since the update will probably come in the form of a pre-compiled net list.

I'd love to have the system as early as possible so that I can get my team started. My team wants to stay with C/C++ but I suspect that we'll have to know LabView as well. We'll have plenty of things to learn to get this new system working and I'd like to get started as soon as possible but I'm not going to worry about things until I know what they really are.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by BrianBSL

I'm pretty sure some of these 'TBD' features are in a far more developed state than you are giving them credit for - but if you saw them now and then a feature was removed from the final product, everyone would be complaining.

Also - 4 years ago when we switched to the PIC system, weren't we not given any information about it until September or October when the EDU controller was announced? Who knows what state it was in in April.

I by no means think that the community should just sit quite and wait until they have all the information - I'm sure some very valid points will be brought up between now and whenever 'then' is - but just keep in mind that 'TBD' doesn't mean no one has thought about it and it isn't 90% done, it just means they don't want to announce it to the public yet.

But we did have a valid and useful practice system by registration time with the PIC system. Given all the announced dates of "Well we'll definitely be done by kickoff" and less official statements of it could be ready by fall, and all the apparently undetermined logistical issues.... I'm somewhat doubtful that these TBD issues are 90% done. If they are and it's just going to take the next 8 months to work out these things... Well I think someone's trying a little too hard to stick to the 80-20 rule.