Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday
It has everything on your list except CAN and Ethernet. However, it DOES have a USB host port (which should also be on your list), so adding Ethernet is trivial (or better yet, use USB devices like cameras instead of Ethernet - they're cheaper).
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Firstly I like this product and what it was based off of, so this is not intended to downplay what it is.
I don't know if for the purposes of FRC you're not just better off buying a cheap general x86 embedded board or laptop to put on the robot for that price. It would serve a lot of purposes, offer Ethernet, WiFi, and even most cheap netbooks have 2 USB root hubs for at least 2 webcams. A cheap multi-tt capable hub might allow more. The hard drives can easily be replaced (or come as is) with solid state drives, or you can always use flash USB drives, compact flash or camera memory in a suitable reader with BIOS boot support (or some combination with an appropriate boot loader).
Plus if you use something like the driver's station you might be able to work a bulk discount.
Additionally, when the control system is no longer the current model, this leaves you with...a PC.
Obviously this VEX product offers the integration with PWM, digital to analog conversion, and other aspects, but it's not hard to add most of that to an x86 computer, or even supplement the computer with a powerful microcontroller or FPGA via USB, USB-CAN, USB-RS232, USB-422/485 or ethernet.
This is very broad and while I love this communication, I wonder if we've manage to hijack this topic. Perhaps we can start a new topic and link it?
The last I read in this topic the idea was to produce measurements to compare the Jaguar and the Victors and the interest in that effort.