Lessons Learned - The Positive

[FRC4ME]

1. The DC regional. This was by far the most well-run regional I've seen - and this is its first year! Everything was perfect, from the spacious pits and full-sized practice field to the knowledgeable volunteers and various VIP speakers. I thought scheduling a rookie regional for week one in the first year using the new control system was a terrible idea, but the teams and volunteers somehow pulled it off and ran a wonderful event.

2. The new control system. Yeah, it had some issues - espeically the drive stations - but things went much better than I expected. As the lead programmer on my team, it was so nice to not worry about memory management, interrupt routines, and floating point math.

3. The uniqueness of the game. I love how FIRST surprised us all by forcing us to design new drivetrains - something many teams haven't done since their second or even rookie years. My team had gotten to the point that "coding" the drive system was a one-day operation. This year, however, we spent the majority of our six weeks working on drive and traction control.

Traction control also gave us programmers a new challenge. In previous years, we spent most of our time working on field positioning - gyros, encoders, and geometry - for autonomous mode scoring. This year, we spent most of our time working on physical modeling - friciton, traction, and inertia - for teleop mode scoring. The shift from math to science provided for a very fun and challenging build season.

I hope next year they can do something unique with the surface yet again. Or maybe give us a few more years on the regolith, so we can tune our moon drive system just as we did our Earth drive systems.