Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron.Graeve
This has already been stated, but yes, Arduinos can be used as co-processors on the robot. You mentioned using the Arduino to control LEDs. This was the system we used to control our AdaFruit lights this year. We had a simple C program that was wipped up by one of the members to respond to a few robot inputs and output the robot state in LED form for our drivers(We just used a few Digital outs and ran them to a few Arduino pins).
We briefly discussed using the serial port on the cRIO for this, but we decided a few lost outputs compensated for the removed protocol pain.
If you are familiar with Java, C is not that different. Also, why is the FRC support of a language important to you?
I hope this helps.
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I am guessing FRC language support is important because he wants to be able to use his knowledge of Arduino Java as a basis for learning FRC Java, or vice versa. But yes, you definitely make a good point when saying Java is very similar to C. Personally, I prefer C because it is used more often in the real world. Our programming team uses labview, though we will be changing over to Java or C within 2 years. The cRio's serial port didn't even cross our minds (If you saw how buried the cRio was on our bot you could guess why) but I really like that idea. It would be a neat learning curve for the electrical team and programming team!
Our new-for-IRI arduino lights are just 12 orange LEDs soldered together in a strip

. I am strongly considering getting some of the adafruit RGBLED strips for our next bot (
I think these are the ones you are talking about). Can you post your code, please? I am very interested in how your system works, as from what I can tell it works completely different from most other bots.