[BB]: Beta Hardware

[Fe_Will]

Originally Posted by Abrakadabra

Most of the IFI lovers seem to be multi-year veterans who most likely had good, knowledgeable mentors who could teach them the mysteries of that system and how to maximize its potential. They came to know it and love it and still wonder why anyone would need anything else. They may think it was "bulletproof", but what they often forget is that it was a very daunting platform for most kids who were probably encountering their first embedded programming platform, usually without any kind of expert guidance, and certainly with very little entry-level documentation. Until Kevin Watson came along and cleaned up the code and wrote a little documentation, most ordinary teams were lucky to just get a drivable platform working. And forget about a mere mortal getting any kind of camera image processing working!

If we really want to grow the FIRST experience, we need to make the steps to success as easy as possible for teams that don't have a full staff of experienced engineers from a large corporation at their beck and call. To my reckoning, the new control system (plus the vastly improved software libraries) is a good step toward that, plus it gives the veteran teams lots of room to expand and stretch the limits of what is possible. The best of both worlds!

FRC is the a varsity level robotics competition... What I hear from your post equates to you wanting a sixth grader to step on to the football field and be competitive with high school upper class men. Please don't encourage the dumbing down of this competition, keeping it at a high level is what makes it relevant.