Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Now FIRST has uploaded there sponsor videos on their youtube webpage. I have watched all of them and found something very interesting things and I hope someone can provide me an answer.

Is FIRST being sponsored by Nvdia? Their video made it seem that every team will be receiving an Nvidia in their KOP but I would like to see if anyone has any better information.

Nvidia video

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

They have provided one to every team at certain regionals in the past. They donated a bunch for FIRST choice for the 2013 season. I really wish they would again. At the time it was the best thing in FIRST Choice.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

They had a booth at CMP, so there's some sort of something there

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

I'll take two of these. Given that they explicitly mention robotics and robotic vision uses they would be a great fit.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

They gave away some pretty nice t-shirts and flash drives at Champs. By far the most consumer-friendly booth there. Here's hoping for more graphics cards next year.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

In 2011 they gave every team at the Lake Superior Regional a GTX 480 graphics card to kickstart our CAD computers. I'm betting they've done the same in other years. Also their booth is always cool at Champs.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Yep, the past NViDIA handouts were incredibly nice. Unfortunately FIRST chose to NOT do this at district events - so folks in districts make yourselves heard so we don't get left out again.

We purchased some of the cards from FIRST Choice to put in computers. They were a huge upgrade over what we had.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

I own a Nvidia Shield personally and in my opinion it would be super cool if you could run a driver station off of it. Maybe the coolest handheld out there right now.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

It wasn't at all regionals - only those specifically sponsored by nVidia (I have no clue if any districts were specifically sponsored by nVidia though).

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

I've always been wondering what NVidia has been working in the background. This seems to be a completely revolutionary product, especially in the ARM departement! This is the first, yeah, first time that I have seen a SoC capable of CUDA and OpenGL, and possibly even OpenCL!

I need to get my hands on one of those! The hardware is good enough for some Minecraft!

NVidia is already a market leader, and I am scared what will come next! :yikes:

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Yeah, the last time they did that the Palmetto regional was 2010.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Not sure how much help this'll be if teams are running autodesk inventor - I've got a GTX 780 and it still runs like crap ;)

If only I had a free solidworks license...

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

I'm sure if you dug around enough, you could boot a custom version of Linux onto your Shield, then download the unofficial Linux Driver Station onto it.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Android is Linux based, and various people are working on an Android DS as well, so it wouldn't be very hard.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

That's a gaming card. It's not meant to paint excessive resolution images to the screeen. Those chips are meant to paint regular HD images to the screen really quickly.

The performance shouldn't be horrible, though. You probably have an i5 or an i7 (or maybe an AMD alternative)! The integrated graphics should be capable of running the program pretty well!

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

I'm not talking about rendering performance, I'm talking about performance while actually working in the application. It's slow and unwieldy at all times, and has always been this way on every machine I've ever run it on.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Apply under the FIRST section on the SolidWorks site. This is how we get our free licenses every season.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

The GPU chips are actually the same in many cases and based on the same architecture, just optimized for different tasks. What makes workstation cards (Quadros) and gaming cards (GeForce) different is the drivers, build quality, and validation. The drivers of gaming cards are optimized for maximum frames per second (FPS), while workstation cards are optimized for image quality. Workstation cards also follow the reference design from the GPU manufacturer, ie. every card is the same. Workstation cards also undergo validation for hundreds of professional applications, which is why they cost more. The first 3.5 minutes of this video explains the difference well.
But you can still run Inventor on a gaming card. I run Inventor on my laptop which has a GeForce GTX 650m, a Core i7 @ 2.3GHz - 3.2GHz (Turbo), and 16GB of RAM. Inventor runs perfectly fine.
The main factor in in-application performance is going to be the CPU clock speed. Autodesk recommends at least 3.0GHz. The RAM amount will affect the size and amount of parts that can be open and worked on at a time. The hard drive speed will affect how fast parts load and save. GPU and CPU cores will affect rendering times.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

I have a haswell i5 @3.4ghz, 16 gigs of ram, and a SSD. The hardware is not the limiting factor here.

The software simply is, as far as I can tell, poorly-optimized and clunky

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Interesting, I haven't found that to be the case. On most machines that I have used, Inventor runs just as well as every other program.

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Haha. I run on my netbook kith a 1.4GHz i3. It runs well enough for me to make decent CAD models, consisting of easily 100 parts!

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

I run it on my little i3 @ 2.53ghz laptop with no dedicated graphics and 4gb of ram. It isn't perfect, and if I work for a long time it eats up ALL of the ram and I have to restart, but hey, it works. Kinda

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

You can get as many free Solidworks license seats as you have registered members on your team...just ask:

www.solidworks.com/FIRST

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

It looks like this thread turned into a "gpu's, cpu's, and cad" discussion. If you look at the video posted, it actually mentions the Jetson tk1, a dev kit aimed at vision processing and robotics.

http://www.techradar.com/news/comput...ev-kit-1249739

At $200 it's first legal. I can see this being included in the kit or available through first choice.

"Now powering the next era of robotics"

Re: Nvdia and FIRST?
 

Nvidia even mentioned FRC in one of their overviews with Newegg: http://youtu.be/XmnM7ikhY1s
It would be super cool to see something like this in the KOP.