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Re: FRC Blogged - The 2015 Control System Request for Proposa
The cRIO is, and has been since its debut in 2009, a sledgehammer used to drive a finishing nail.
Simply put, FRC teams simply don't require the horsepower it provides.
Further to that, its excessive horsepower has enabled teams to get sloppy with their coding, resulting in 100% cpu usage, communication failures, and more.
Many FIRSTers out there will remember the CMUcam that we used to use, paired with an 8bit microcontroller, and serial 115kbaud radio, and the impressive things teams were able to do with that (hint: robots haven't really made order of magnitude shifts in capabilities, despite the communications stream being ~540x faster, the on-board processor being ~50x faster). The only really notable capability in my mind, is the ability to stream video from the camera to the DS. Which could easily be done by a newer microcontroller on a robust 802.11 based setup, without resorting to the sledgehammer that is the cRIO.
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