Quote:
Originally Posted by orangemoore
The transition to a controller that is competently dedicated to the FIRST Robotics Competition platform was a big step that probably helped facilitate the "easy" transition.
While I wasn't around for the last switch from what I heard it wasn't as pretty and there were many problems.
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The switch you speak of (in 2009) was FROM a purpose-built 8-bit PIC microcontroller based solution built by IFI that has since been discontinued AFAIK. We had serial radios operating in the 900MHz band, and you had DS->Robot Communications within 5 seconds (usually more like 1-2) of turning on your robot. The 8bit microcontrollers also left a hard limit on processing power that was significant.
Most teams didn't have issues, but a few of the do-everything teams had to start getting creative with their code so that they didn't run out of processing ability.
To me, I think the roboRIO transition is a reasonably good attempt to bring back many of the elements we used to like about the old IFI controllers (smaller footprint, robust construction that deals well with electrical faults), while keeping the improved processing power of the cRIO which has enabled many exciting computer-vision based autonomous routines to be so much more effective than the CMUCam based color-blob tracking we had pre-2009.