Quote:
Originally Posted by daniel_dsouza
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Team 846 ran with
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856119069 this offseason (replacing a beagleboard which we used during the season). It turned out to be a very convenient solution, small, light, inexpensive and powerful. We are booting ubuntu server off an SD card formatted to have both a windows readable FAT32 partition, and a linux partition. We are powering it with
http://www.amazon.com/3-5-30V-4-0-30.../ref=pd_ybh_15, which worked. The peak power draw (only during the boot) is roughly 20 watts. Its easy to work being x86 , and we don't have to worry too much about performance. We're running two vision programs all the time (one for aligning the robot shooting yaw and distance, and one for tracking and picking up balls autonomously faster than a driver can
), and we just leave both running at the same time. We don't even max out the CPU freerunning at over 30 FPS for both programs (admittedly with the same code that was originally optimized for the beagleboard).
In short, why we chose (and love) a solution like this:
- Ease of use (x86)
- Performance
- Ease of powering
- Low cost
- Lots of IO (The beagleboard only has a single USB port whose bandwidth is shared with the usb to ethernet chip and the usb hub)
- Ease of fetching video and logs from the computer using the flash card
- Modularity, its a lot easier for someone to work on the vision code at home, making it easier to involve more programmers.