[FTC]: Samantha? Like it or hate it?

[jamie_1930]

I knew from the start that I wasn't going to be fond of the new samantha module and fcs setup, especially after today's events at the Clarkson Regional, however this is not an attack on those that run the regional it is a new system and things like this can happen and I hope we can come to the root of why here.

My initial thoughts were with the comparison to FRC I feel like while using new technology to pilot the robots does open up more possibilities it will also allow for more problems. Right now I feel like many of the problems of the new samantha module come from interference, as well as the fact that it is brand new this year. For instance it seems like now every new gadget has wifi capabilities and if every cell phone and ipod that's in the arena is putting out a wifi signal then there will be a compounding rate of interference with the wifi used to communicate with the field. I liked bluetooth because it seemed like whenever a problem occured it was my fault not someone else and that meant I could correct the problem the next time we went out for a match. Also while many things do use bluetooth the limited range means someone on the other side of the arena won't be interferring with your connection and there is a smaller number of such devices being used.

If anyone sees something wrong with what I said above please correct me and if anyone that was at Clarkson today has any more insight on the problems that occured I would love to here what happened. Please feel free to post about any problems you see with the samantha and possible fixes to these. We're engineers and we're here to fix problems, please don't post here trying to attack or blame anyone else that isn't going to solve anything, plus while some field techs may make mistakes sometimes we would too if we had their job.