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Re: NI Week Athena Announcement and Q&A Panel
I'm loving the footprint.
If I'm not mistaken, its considerably smaller than even the old IFI systems.
I've long thought that the cRIO was serious quantities of overkill for our application, and I can see that roboRIO is no different in that regard. The truth of the matter is that we simply don't need that much processing horsepower.
5 years ago, we were running robots, with vision, gyros, accelerometers, and other sensors, on simple 8 bit microcontrollers running at clock speeds of a few 10s of MHz, worth less than $10. 10 years ago, we were working with just 26 bytes of variable space.
I'm disappointed by the price point. To me, a FIRST controller should be priced such that each team can receive a free one each year, as we did with the IFI system. I know I'm not the only one that feels 1 free donated one, and then needing to buy one each subsequent year is NOT a good solution. This is partly an artifact of using so much excess processing power.
I have extensive experience with RT variants of Linux through my workplace. We use RTAI currently, after switching away from RTLinux several years ago when it stopped being updated. If that experience has taught me anything, its that roboRIO's boot times are unlikely to be dramatically different from cRIOs. I certainly hope my prediction is wrong on this front.
I'm really interested to see what they do in terms of radios. The existing solution using standard 5GHz wifi equipment (2.4GHz in Israel, due to 5GHz being a restricted military frequency) is a bit lacking (the biggest bottleneck in robot boot times is the radios).
All in all, I think roboRIO will be a dramatic improvement over cRIO as an FRC platform. I just think it falls a bit short in places it could have excelled.
We'll see though. Maybe I'll be surprised.
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