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Unread 05-05-2013, 06:34
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Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC

Quote:
Originally Posted by mman1506 View Post
The problem with the beaglebone and others is that they do not have a Real time operating system. This means that there is a delay when inputting data and things don't always work in real time. This becomes an issue for safety and a number of other things as proccesing can become delayed as you can not expect it to processe an input in a certain time frame.

While they do have I/O doing something simple like PWM generation requires special scripting.
There was an alternative system that could handle that presented. What FIRST wanted was a company to be essentially already be in NI's/Vex's educational market with FIRST. So basically from the release date of the RFP to the time they made their decision you had to be in thriving production with a client base (less than 6 months).

I helped submit one of the bids and engineer the solution presented. The solution survived the bid. I would not waste this kind of time and money doing something like this if I did not have other plans for it (especially since it entailed writing a graphical language framework). I've not heard from the other team that put the Arduino Kickstarter up about my offer to simply hand them the same donation I gave them by the defunct Kickstarter.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gdeaver View Post
So a little 8 bit controller with no fpu, no fpga, no native lan, no RTOS, and etc etc etc, can replace what we have now. Every team has the expertise to implement a low level ISR and can drop down and write directly to the hardware at the register level when needed? Your going to take a 9th grader and throw that at him? I think allot of people do not realize the power we now have available to us. Even the old IFI controller had two 8 bit pics in it. The vexters at least have an arm chip to play with. The only way teams accomplished complex things with the old IFI solution was some excellent low level code done by Kevin Watson. I can't believe the number of people that want to go backwards. There is a place for an Arduino in First. One of our students used an Uno and some leds to make a heads up targeting system for the driver. Got an award for it. We are using a Uno to read a 3 axis accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer to make an IMU. Reading the 9 16 bit values over I2C and doing a bunch of triangle math is saturating the Uno. Yes, Arduinos do have a place in first. They make good coprocessors.
I've been programming since before I was 10 and one of my very first embedded platforms was the Intel 8051 and yes I spent many an hour writing assembly interrupt service routines. So yes *if* someone had to do it there are people out there that could step up with examples as you also pointed out.

That being said not every processor needs to have interrupts. In point of fact I helped present a non-interrupt centric solution to FIRST for this RFP. You could put interrupt capable devices into the system but you did not need to. It worked by basically polling which normally would be very resource intense but you could cheaply put so much processing into what we presented it was not an issue. There was still plenty of opportunity to implement custom logic via programmable logic in the system if a very sensitive timing constraint arose.

Again neither here not there, The system we proposed is currently being prepared for use in a non-FIRST commerical hardened real time application.

Last edited by techhelpbb : 05-05-2013 at 06:50.