As many readers here at CD may know, Texas Instruments is a diamond level supplier to FIRST, but you haven’t seen our name in your KoP before. TI works hard in the background to supply the silicon that goes into the control systems components, but we wanted to put our technology directly into your hands this year. To this end, we've included a new MSP430 LaunchPad in every single KoP.
Now, you can go ahead and use it for whatever you like (plenty of examples and information avaliable here:
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/launchpad.html), but our flagship purpose for this year is as a custom operator interface for your driver’s station. A solution was developed by software engineers at TI so that all you have to do is flash the board, and it will show up as a USB HID Gamepad, ready for input. This has been fully tested and vetted by our best guys, so you know it won’t stop working in the middle of a match.
We also worked closely with NI to make sure that it’s as easy as possible for you to get started, and get some cool new features out of it. You may have already noticed the “Game Pad Tool” in your NI update. This is a dedicated application to make programming easy; just select your pinout and hit program, no additional downloads needed.
Our engineers also worked with NI to add digital outputs to the HID specification available to you via the driver station. You can now use the LaunchPad to set digital indicators or anything else you can think of, straight from the driver’s station using new WPILib API calls.
Since there is a limit to the number of pins available, we worked out three configurations that should have you guys covered:
- 8x analog, 11 digital inputs, and 11 digital outputs,
- 8x analog, 16 digital inputs, and 6 digital outputs,
- 8x analog, 20 digital inputs, and 2 digital outputs
Feel free to let us know if you want something else though.
For more information on the solution, with some fun examples of what you can do with a custom operator’s interface, check out our wiki page here:
http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index....cs_Competition
In addition to our activity here on CD, we’ve also set up a dedicated FRC support hotline that will let you contact TI engineers directly at
FRCSupport@list.ti.com. Everyone on this list is not only a TI engineer, but also a dedicated FRC mentor, so try not to send us too many emails during week 6
We have a lot of other ideas for using the LaunchPad on your robots as well (an LED controller is at the top of our list) so keep an eye out for more examples to come!