(Ab)Using old FIRST Electronics
The FIRST robotics competition is a competition held anually in which high school teams, with corporate or college mentors, play some game remotely with robots. This is a really big series of events.
Teams that have been around a while collect a lot of old FIRST equipment, including custom electronics. While some parts are easily reusable for other things, the custom control electronics can't (officially) be used except as a complete system. This was bothering me, as I had access to several pairs of old FIRST radios that should have been usable for other projects, in addition to an RC and OI.
Warning
Use this information at your own risk. This page deals with information that is not provided by IFI and the systems change every year or two. It's quite possible that your equipment is different enough from what I have that these techniques won't work, or may cause damage (although the stuff seems to be built well enough to avoid that).
It's also possible that there are technical errors here, but I've tried to make this page as accurate as possible.
I should also point out that it would be highly irresponsible to transmit data on FIRST frequencies (900MHz ISM) near a FIRST competition for obvious reasons. This specifically includes transmitting on IFI radios. I think this is a major reason why IFI hasn't provided any help on using the radios with non-FIRST electronics.
Detailed Information
This information covers the old 2001 control system that I have laying around. Some of it may apply to newer control systems, but don't count on it.
RC
I haven't done much with the RC. It uses two PIC16 microcontrollers (only the user MCU has flash memory) and has programming ports for both. It should be possible to replace the BASIC interpreter with C code although this would require figuring out the communications protocol between the two MCUs.