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Re: Looking for CRIO and modules
Your options are nearly infinite. In the end, everything boils down heavily to what you want. If you want just basic control of a handful of motors, you'd be well off with an Arduino or a Parallax Propeller. You can implement a bluetooth serial pipe to create some sort of quick and dirty wireless solution.
If you want something much more, like full blown networking, I'd suggest that you'd want to minimally use a Parallax propeller due to the amount of RAM and it's parallel processing capabilities. If you want to be even more smart, you could have a Raspberry Pi perform all the networking and connections. This can connect to your custom driver station program to be controlled using. The main caveat of using a board such as a Raspberry Pi is the fact that the I/O capabilities are quite limited, in terms of the pin count. You'd probably not be able to run more than a handful of motors from a Pi directly. You could save a pin by remapping the activity light on the Pi to some process or cron in your program.
The magic happens when you link both, the Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller such as the Arduino or Propeller chip together. The Pi has the processing capabilities to do quite a bit of floating point math. It also has the ability to implement sockets with ease!
So basically,
Microcontroller + Dev Board -> success
I am pretty sure that the cRIO does something kind of similar. The FPGA is great for watching data like voltage levels with a high precision and poll rate. However, the PPC core is capable of running your program with ease, as you can run the JVM and more on it!
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