[techhelpbb]

Not only can someone do this, I already have a Parallax Propeller powering a brushed DC motor control and it does CAN with a Microchip transceiver. That controller is not a FIRST allowed part and can not be used on a FIRST robot without review by FIRST which at this time I have no reason to do.

I also constructed a robot control system with Parallax Propellers at the heart (plural if you like).

There are other people out there with plenty of experience that share your interest though please keep in mind that FIRST does retain the rights to ultimately decide what is on your FIRST approved robot and at this time you'll require far more than a working prototype to achieve what you desire.

So far as I know you can use the Parallax Propeller as a co-processor to the cRIO per the custom circuit rules, but these circuits as others have said, may not operate the motor outputs themselves. So you can't put the motor controllers, hobby servos or even relays on your Parallax Propeller board I/O. You could plug the Parallax Propeller board into the cRIO via the digital side car to...for instance...create a port for an SVGA monitor (though I don't know if having the actual monitor on the robot on the field would be legal you'd have to investigate). I currently see no reason you couldn't interface sensors to the Parallax Propeller such that you could service it with the cRIO. I can see how it might have some value in that sense.

As to the rest....the Parallax Propeller is a very different design philosophy than is common to much of the rest of the microcontroller industry.

It is not realistic to compare the clock speed of the cRIO with the Propeller.

The entire concept behind the Propeller is parallelism. It does not implement interrupts, but it does implement timers and PLL. It also implements shared memory space and common access to that shared memory and I/O using a round-robin fixed timing system.

The Propellor 1 for better for worse is very sparse on peripherals.
This means less idiosyncrasy in the integration.
However that means more glue and extra hardware (which can lead to cost but also to flexibility).

I come from a background of parallel computing using CPUs in mainframes.
To me for some applications the raw parallel nature of the Parallax Propeller makes a heck of a lot of sense when the target system parameters get unspecific.

I also have experience and close ties with Atmel, Microchip, Intel and Motorola. If you know the parameters of your project specifically sometimes it makes the best sense to use a microcontroller / microprocessor that is most closely designed for that purpose as compared to the Propeller which you can probably massage into that purpose.

As far as raw horsepower is concerned...there are plenty of things that a pile of Parallax Propellers can be tweaked to do that the purpose built cRIO would need to be redesigned for.

There is, at least to me, a comfortable middle ground where the Parallax Propeller is a real design option just as the ARM, the Atmel, and the PIC.

As far as the concerns about math, floating point, hardware support....virtually no student I have seen in FIRST is writing code for the cRIO in assembler. The ability to yield pure untainted performance is highly dependent on the quality of the byte interpreter or the compiler optimization. If you really need that kind of raw math performance there are many options including software and hardware coprocessors. One could debate the deciding factors on the impact for a very long time.

Obviously there is a very real limit in which the students will get lost in the large piles of minutia that will ensue.