Sharing with the community

[fangeugene]

Is there any guidance on what we should and shouldn’t be sharing with the community as we go through the process of integrating SystemCore onto our robot? We want to make sure we balance sharing information with the community and what FIRST and Limelight are okay with us disclosing publicly. Thanks!

[Kevin-OConnor]

Great question Eugene! FIRST, WPILib and Limelight are making an effort to be highly transparent with the community with regards to information on the SystemCore and MotionCore devices and testing. This repo, including discussions and documents we will be posting related to the testing, are public and can be viewed by all teams. In general, this means that Alpha teams should be comfortable sharing pretty much any information about their testing with other teams.

Having said that, we would appreciate if teams make sure to consider the context of Alpha testing when deciding whether, where and how (i.e. language) to share particular information. The number one goal of Alpha testing is get feedback on the hardware with enough time left to make changes if necessary. Others in the community may not be as informed as Alpha teams are on where the device is at in the development process and that, if a pain point is significant enough, there are still opportunities for hardware revision.

While we expect and welcome feedback on the software as we go, we know the software (and especially the documentation) are not show ready yet. For example, the OS flashing process available today (Limelight HW Manager) is not the final anticipated process for teams (web-based updates), the on-bot programming experience is not available yet, WPILib has withheld substantial breaking changes we know are coming to help Alpha teams get started quicker, etc. We certainly don't want teams to feel like they can only share positive things with the community, but particularly on the software/docs front would encourage restraint when sharing pain points as many of these items will likely be addressed well before release.

[Chronosera]

When development gets to the point where some of those breaking changes on the WPILib side are ready enough, could there be a way to have both pre- and post-breaking changes available? I can definitely see the merit to either way; being able to choose would be super nice, so we can use what we're used to but also be able to experiment and test with the updated version.

[ThadHouse]

Once we start doing the breaks, nothing will stop you from using the old versions, but we would definitely like people to push towards the newer versions with the breaking changes. Otherwise we miss testing those new features.

[Chronosera]

Makes sense :) Looking forward to testing the changes!