Quote:
Originally Posted by techhelpbb
There are countless high performance items that could end up on robots. Parallex Propellers, GreenArray GA144s, Altera and Xilinx FPGA and that's not counting the likely laptops and embedded PCs that'll show up.
And yes...this probably would get crazy:
http://www.objectivej.com/hardware/p...ter/index.html
(Pull the red wire...the red wire!)
Now this said, someone's bound to show up with a laptop on the robot this year. |
There's really not much preventing that this year, there is a variety of ways to mount an embedded PC on the robot and have it use the cRio as a pretty pricey, FIRST controlled I/O expander, using an Ethernet link or something similar. In which case it behaves like the system you and Joe described.
Personally, I'd really like to see FIRST open up the control system with a design competition. Let teams design and submit control system ideas, designed around what teams want/need and their resources and let the FIRST community and it's thousands of brilliant minds weigh in. We already have a competition to design robots in the winter and spring, why not control system summer and fall?
While the guys at NI and TI have done an admirable job, I do agree the current system is an amalgam of several good ideas with bits hacked together to work in a manner that's.... well let's go with frustrating. But those guys were small in numbers, and probably did not have all that much to work with. I sincerely think the mentors and students of FIRST stand a good chance of coming up with an effective, workable solution to our somewhat oddball use case. Even if only because of the sheer amounts of brainpower we have at our disposal.
But this isn't the thread for that idea. I'm not sure that thread exists (yet).
Back on-topic:
It'd be really interesting to see a qualitative side-by-side test of a new Jag vs a new Victor with both buried in temperature sensors and voltage and current probes. Perhaps even some rig with an active matching network between a Jag and a Victor running in complement. Say the Jag running 'forward' supplying a steady current in the 30A range, and the Victor running 'reverse' sinking the same current, with some kind of active FET arrangement to regulate current flow between the two. This would ensure that they're both being exposed to very close to if not the exact same conditions across all tests. You could do these tests at a variety of power levels and compare.
Eric, Joe, Al, what do you guys think of that idea?