[apalrd]

This sounds like a terrible idea, even if it were legal (which it is not).

The Propeller is one of the last processors I would want to use as a robot controller. There are far better micros which have far more useful peripherals.

The cRio IO is really quite slow since it's read through the FPGA which itself reads it from the modules over some high-speed bus (unsure exactly what it is), and the layering and OS overhead isn't insignificant, but it's still a 400mhz 32-bit PowerPC with hardware floating point and many megabytes of RAM. The Propeller runs at max 80mhz with an external clock, has 32 IO lines with no analog, no peripherals to speak of other than the 8 cores (Each of which has 512 words of RAM) plus 32K of system memory (RAM and ROM).

For some comparison, some of the MPC5500/5600 processors I deal with could be configured to run the RT control loops of a robot through peripherals and DMA entirely (without any actual processor action or interrupts). That is the processor I would like to use in FRC.