FRC Blogged - Frank Answers Fridays: August 30, 2013

[Greg McKaskle]

"after five years ..."

Good question. The reality is that some portion of the system changes each season. Bridges are discontinued, manufacturers release firmware updates which they highly recommend using. The Einstein problems meant that many weeks were spent identifying what could have happened, investigating what probably happened, and confirming what did happen. Because of what occurred, radio configurations changed, antennas changed, DS had new responsibilities, logging was enhanced, etc.

And yes, features were added as well. NI had postponed releasing simulation for several years already and we decided to squeeze it in. SmartDashboard/NetworkTables had some issues that needed to be resolved from the previous year, so it was reworked for each language.

I've released SW with large betas and small ones. There are benefits to each approach. I'm not sure how much this really impacts the policy in the original question.

Greg McKaskle