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.