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Unread 15-08-2013, 16:00
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evanperryg evanperryg is offline
IT'S THE BUMP N' DUMP
AKA: Evan Grove
FRC #4536 (The Minutebots)
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Re: NI Week Athena Announcement and Q&A Panel

Quote:
Originally Posted by apalrd
The Vex guys can boot a Cortex and user code and establish radio link in ~15s. The PIC-based IFI would boot and establish radio link in 5s. Why are we sitting around a minute? And getting worse every year?
Very true. The specs on this thing are pretty impressive, yet (at this point) it is still pathetically slow.

Quote:
Originally Posted by racer26
The truth of the matter is that we simply don't need that much processing horsepower.

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.
You seem to forget that this thing isn't specifically designed for FRC. It was designed for student robotics programs. Some of those programs may require more processing performance than we need.

Why would you need to buy a new cRio every year? That's silly and a waste of money. My team owns 2 cRios, enough for the competition bot and a practice bot. Everything else can probably just use a vex signal splitter or an arduino.

Quote:
Originally Posted by apalrd View Post
I don't believe at all that you can't boot a controller capable of all of FRC's needs roughly as fast as the Vex system, with comparable times for tether and radio operation. You might have to better define what FRC's needs actually are.
My team knows, dead certain, that you can run an FRC bot as effectively off Vex as off of the cRio. In fact, we have our entire 2012 bot wired into a cortex and it works perfectly.

All in all, I am really excited for the new controller. I love how small it is, in particular. The cRio is really bulky for what we use it for, and this opens up more space for other electrical components. However, if the bootup times are still 40s at release I will be very disappointed. Seeing how great the specs are, I suspect that all they need to do is refine the code. Also, I assume it is too far into development at this point, but 4 Relay outputs doesn't seem like enough.
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2013
Wisconsin Regional Winner 2014 Midwest Regional Finalist 2015 Midwest Regional Chairman's Award, Finalist, Archimedes Division Champion, IRI Semifinalist 2016 Midwest Regional Chairman's Award, Finalist, Archimedes Division Gracious Professionalism Award, R2OC Winner
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2015
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