reprogram during a competition

[jacob_dilles]

At the risk of poking at a delicate subject – could the robot legally reprogram itself during a competition?

With a normal match the UI and the RC are in constant communication, but until the 15 sec autonomous mode is up, none of the joystick inputs (read – any input that operators can control) are active. As we have covered in other threads, a switch set before the match started could be detected by the robot before the controls were nulled. However it is blatantly wrong to have the robot be reprogram itself based on, say, at the location of the vision tetras: although theoretically possible with a 16F84, a flash card, and some clever coding and a 6 way switch.

My question pertains to reprogramming of the robot, by the robot, at the end of the 15 second autonomous period. My team has had problems with limited memory of the PIC, and with camera tracking and accelerometer algorithms we are close to the maximum size, without any of the operator-assist code.

Consider this example: When the 15 seconds of self control time is up, the autonomous flag is cleared; the RC pulls a digital output high. A carefully programmed microcontroller would emulate the serial port of a PC, putting the RC into boot loader mode and handing it the second set of code from an external EEPROM or “flash drive”. After the 1.5 or so seconds that the process takes, the robot is reset with its new code and on its way for the 2 minutes of user control.

anyone have any comments? does this violates any FIRST rules?
Thanks – jsd