The Inspection checklist includes this: “VEX IQ firmware (VEXos) is up to date.”
If Vex releases a new firmware the night before a competition and none of the robots are on the latest firmware, would they all fail inspection?
What if the major version is current, but minor version is not? The latest VEX IQ firmware is v2.1.3. So v. 2.1.2, would have to fail? Will the robot program work the same after firmware update?
Robot SHOULD work the same.
If you know new firmware was released the night pre competition, download it. If the inspectors tell you to update firmware, do it, it only takes like 1 minute. Although they rely tell you to update firmware, as it is hard to detest if it is up to date(unless you broke another rule, and changed the firmware yourself - this is illegal)
Edit:quote
This post should be categorized in #vex-iq-challenge-discussion - it’s not about VRC, and the judging Q&A isn’t for rules questions.
Strictly speaking, yes - though I might be inclined to cut teams some slack if a new firmware version released literally the night before.
See semantic versioning - in the example you gave, the major and minor version are the same, and the patch version is different. In any case, all firmware updates are required.
Looking at that webpage above, we see that changes to the minor and patch versions are always backwards-compatible. So (assuming VEXos follows the SerVer spec) it’s safe to assume that any program you wrote for any 2.x.x firmware will work on any other 2.x.x firmware (unless it exploits a bug that got patched or something). But, new major versions may make incompatible API changes, so when hypothetical v3.0.0 is released, then your programs for 2.x.x may or may not work, depending on what they did and what changed.