Quote:
Originally Posted by Gdeaver
I think everyone is is forgetting just how much the FPGA does on the robot controller.
|
There's more than one way to approach this issue. The real advantage of the FPGA is it's flexibility which no FIRST team can really tap in the current system. One doesn't need to know VHDL or Verilog to get a circuit into an FPGA there are graphical tools to help with that.
The issue with things like encoders is that they produce outputs that are encoded and can do so at a high rate. There is always going to be a motivation to put something like that on a hardware interrupt. If your interrupt driven CPU is fast enough then that can work. However, in all honesty, for something state centric and subtle like that logic is just a better fit. So certainly the FPGA as a programmable logic array is a very elegant solution to providing what might be a considerable pile of gates and might need to be altered (puts down my wire-wrap gun).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gdeaver
The one thing that complicates the whole First system is machine vision. How do we support it. It's the most hardware demanding thing that we do.
|
I think the issue with machine vision isn't merely the question of having it exist as a function. It's a question of a team's approach to the result. One team might want sample code that works just handed to them with minimal effort. One team might want a PyGames example that just works with some need to get it running. Someone might want to use OpenCV to get to professional machine vision tools, but still others might want to tackle the problem as a raw stream of data. I'm not sure there's a reason to discard any of those approach as they lend themselves to diversity.
To me the solution is to separate the machine vision from the control system enough that they cooperate with each other very well but the diversity of the approach is not restrained. Someone could always make a 'standard machine vision module' that you could just slap on the robot for those that like the feature but can't deal with the details.