Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
Think about it. If FIRST wants to keep the router on the robot morphology, then this box could be ethernet device. Just like the Jaguars, they could force the device to prove it is running an approved version of firmware and then have that firmware shut everything off if an enable message that only FIRST approved software can generate (although rumor has it that folks have broken the Jaguar protocol -- in theory a reasonably secure system could be designed, we are not running military hardware here -- there is not a lot of benefit to someone being able to spoof the enable/disable signal on a FIRST robot).
Once you have that box on board your robot, you can have basically any controller you want on your robot. Put a Pandaboard on board, or a PC or a CRIO or an IFI system. Do whatever you want. All the IO that matters is controlled by FIRST.
This is SO doable.
Joe J.
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Yeap, in effect I already have this.
I have a robot controller made from Parallax Propellers (several).
The Propeller produces a virtual serial port over the USB connection typical on the development board.
I have that connected to a dual band NetGear N WiFi router running a patched version of DD-WRT.
This NetGear box has a USB port for sharing printers, I snagged it to plug in the Propeller (handy that).
Therefore the WiFi box in this case is hardware provided by NetGear and software mostly provided by the DD-WRT community.
I chose the Parallax Propeller because of the 8 cogs and the many shared I/O lines. With this you don't need to task switch you can run 8 process with one in each cog at 20Mips (if you don't overclock). With a few of them (and they are cheap) you get dozens and dozens of I/O.
Reading encoders is not a problem when you have 20Mips to do whatever you feel like with (in BASIC, assembler or C).
I can send code to it...and it doesn't take like 5 minutes to do either!
I get around the power issue the same way the cRIO basically does. The battery is pulled through a step-up regulator from whatever the battery voltage is to 24VDC (sort of like the cRIO) and then 3 step-down regulators provide 3.3VDC (for the Propellers), 5VDC for various I/O and 12VDC for relay coils (yes I have electromechanical relays on this...and they work dandy). The battery can cave well below 3VDC and this will not even blink. It's easy to get to 5V I/O using either level converters or 2N7000 MOSFETs.
Currently this frame is equipped with Jaguars and one speed control I built myself (my speed control does CAN as well thanks to some handy parts from Microchip).