Fully Open FIRST System

[Astronouth7303]

While thinking about the current state of affairs as far as development on the FIRST competition system goes (end-to-end, all the hardware/software needed to run competitions and robots), I had a crazy idea.

What if every component of the competition system was open and available for hacking outside of competitions? That is, what if the FIRST community designed its own control system?

Before everyone chews me out for it being completely impractical, let me explain fully.

FIRST Robotics Competition has the workings to make a thriving developer community. In some ways, there already is (especially in secondary applications, eg The Blue Alliance team database). But the FIRST organization has squandered that.

So my idea is to open source every detail of what shows up on site. All the software scheduling and controlling matches, the hardware communicating with robots, the robot controllers, the OI, the master firmware, everything. The designs and software are freely available in an open source fashion.

This means that teams are free to modify and improve the system. They can add features, improve performance, and fix bugs. Anyone with sufficient interest can look at what goes on under the hood.

The key for it to not descend into chaos is that teams are still required to use electronics that come in the kit of parts each year, with approved and released firmware.

What this means is that even if small teams don't touch the innards, teams must contribute improvements they make to the system in order to benefit from their work.

I'm not saying that every bit of silicon needs to be open source. I'm perfectly OK with commercial, off-the-shelf parts for things like wireless routers, motor controllers, sensors, operating systems, processors, etc. But I think that the system should be open, with such dependencies documented.

There are technical ways of ensuring that teams aren't abusing this openness: encryption, hashing software, controller self-tests, analysis of user software, etc.

A great many factors prevent this from working in FIRST as it currently stands. Factors like politics, FIRST org. turnover, individual mindsets towards open source, ability to produce 2500 boards based on an open design in <6mo, and on-site competition support. Some of the factors are not necessarily things like security, integrity of the system, cheating, etc.

It should be possible for many basic issues to be resolved. Things like tested and vetted designs before release to manufacture, multiple eyes checking changes, releasing change logs from year to year, etc.

Just one request: before flaming me for considering the sky to be a nice goal, think about it some. Yes, it's a total pipe dream. But it would still be awesome if true.