[Greg McKaskle]

A few small points on the PWM signals.

The WPILib API uses a single float value ranging from -1 to 1. Under the hood, it maps this between the usable high and low int values based on the calibration info. This doesn't attempt to linearize the response, but does remove the outer shoulders. Even when not calibrated, these values are given mfr specific settings which should lead to pretty good performance, especially for drive motors.

As noted, neither the 9076's Freescale processor or the FPGA are 16 bit. The FPGA, as used, has no cores. It is highly reconfigurable, but for FIRST, thus far it acts as the high-horsepower I/O engine. It is capable of I/O rates up to 40MHz, but the I/O modules, especially those selected for use in the FIRST competition, take many cycles to reconfigure. The digital module being used is highly flexible with 32 channels, but with an access time of around 6.5microsecs. For discrete I/O on the robot, this is often the limiting factor -- encoder rate, PLM generation resolution, digital triggers, etc. As shown at ni.com/motion, the 9076 is not the limiting factor.

Greg McKaskle