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Unread 27-03-2012, 06:33
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Re: Control System Design Contest Proposal

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandon_L View Post
Everyone has a classmate, whats wrong with using that as the brains. Ethernet to a radio and some kind of pwm breakout/analog & digital IO (maybe done through USB?) and your set...battery just powers motors and the such.

EDIT: Second thought, that thing is so slow.. but the general idea of a laptop controller could work?
There's no reason you can't use the laptop as the brains and several projects outside of FIRST do just that. However, the issue is that the PC is still basically an interrupt driven device and it's full of software emulated hardware pushing down on it's CPU in current generations.

The issue becomes that using the PC in realtime control applications can be tricky. So the solution is usually to make the peripherals smarter. At some point when you hook up a powerful microcontroller to buffer events for the PC (or even to handle the USB communication requirements) you've done what I already intended with the Parallax Propellers. You've driven a purpose built control system with a generic computing device to gain the benefits of both and overcome the limits of either alone.
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