Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

Reported spammer.

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

Thanks for all of the alpha teams who post pictures of all of the cool toys NI and FIRST on top of going through all of the tests so everyone else's stuff doesn't catch on fire when it shows up in a year.

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

Thanks to all the testers out there for the great information.

One thing I noted in the NI specs that is significantly different about the new system from the CRIO. In the NI specs it states that the OS is "Linux with Real-time extensions". This is a major change from VXWorks on the cRIO.
I know from experience that the timing and task characteristics (which a prior poster asked about) will be different.

I would be very interested to see how this affects threading, CPU utilization and associated behavior.

Like others I am concerned about the USB based network connection and it's throughput. In general, I just don't like USB for highthroughput applications like networking.

Also, how will this new setup affect those who use separate laptops or single-board computers for vision processing on the robot? I did not see on the USB wireless box if there were additional ports. I see one on the new control system. But if I am using a network based camera and a separate processing CPU would I be allowed to add a hub/switch to interface them? Suppose I wanted to have my vision processor send stuff to the DS like we did with the Kinect last year (or even for debugging)? I suspect many of these questions will have to wait until 2015 rules. But at the same time a lot
answers to these questions would certainly affect pre-2015 planning and training.

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

The OS is not just for FRC, but will be used in industrial applications as well. NI has spent several years working with the linux community to characterize and improve jitter and determinism. You are correct to be skeptical, but on the positive side, the number of devices and services that can be run on the linux device is an order of magnitude better, and the jitter measurements look quite good.

The device has an ethernet port as well as two USB host ports. Both are technically expandable via hubs. I'll let you place odds on whether FIRST rules will have them open or closed. In addition, there is SPI, I2C, and serial -- all useful for communicating to devices.

Greg McKaskle

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

For those of you interested, here is a quick hands-on of the system:

http://youtu.be/JP5bWXX0V2w

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

It's been a while, and I think the community is due for an update!

All the teams were out in NH this past weekend for an Alpha Test Weekend. Basically, FIRST set up a field, brought our robots and a few members from each team in, and we spent all day Saturday and half the day Sunday working. All three languages are mostly working (some features haven't been finished yet... after all, this is still an Alpha! We'll be testing those features as they get finished), all 9 robots were on the field competing, and we ran 6-robot matches. We had close shooting, full court shooting, and some level-1 climbs. All in all, just about everything you could hope for from the control system over a year before we'll all really be using it!

For our robot in particular, we came into the weekend with C++, and had no issues connecting to the field and driving around through every match we were in on Saturday. We went back to the hotel room Saturday night with new Java libraries, worked on it a bit, and came back Sunday. By lunch on Sunday we ran through a full match with no issues at all. So, two languages working basically identically in the same weekend on the new control system. It can't get much better than that!

For those of you wondering, we're still working on getting climbing working again. As you can imagine (if you've seen our videos), it's a fairly complicated process in the code, and requires quite a bit of fine tuning. We found that the potentiometer inputs we have for feedback are returning a different range of values (but still consistent, repeatable, logical values), and we've had to go through working on getting everything set up again. We have 3 positions working without any issue (our "driving" position, our "ready to climb" position where we can grab the first bar, and our "pull up" position to get us up to the first bar), so our problems are definitely not an issue with the control system... it's just getting our completely rewritten code all working like it should be.

We plan to continue developing both Java and C++, since we have them both at exactly the same points right now.

I want to give a big shout out to everyone at FIRST, WPI, NI, and CTRE for everything they did this weekend. They were all there with us helping us fix any issues we had, taking our feedback (always with a smile!), and overall just giving us an amazing experience for the weekend. FIRST has really put together an all-star team to get us this new control system!

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

Yeah. I know that. However, I am wondering where your team signed up for this

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

From what I hear, there was no application process for alpha testing. The 9 teams were chosen by FIRST, making sure that these teams were capable of carrying out alpha testing, that there was an equal distribution of languages used, and that each one could act as a mentoring team in 2015 in their own separate regions when the new control system rolls out.

Re: 2015 Control System Alpha Testing
 

As was stated in the picture thread, you do not sign up for alpha testing. FIRST sent a query to a select group of teams asking if they would like to test the new control system. From these teams, 9 were chosen to be part of the alpha test. Our team was a LabVIEW beta test team last year. I did not check to see if the alpha test teams were all beta testers at one point.

Pay attention for a beta test announcement. Most likely, this will be announced when there is a new software version release. You can apply to be a beta team. Your team administrator and mentors should receive an email from FIRST regularly, one of which will announce beta testing.