Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaci
Additionally, approval process states that the report must be in conjunction with a company as a vendor, and all information disclosed at kickoff. I see the MXP board as an extremely powerful tool, but for some teams they may want to keep this interface board private, or just not have to deal with manufacturing for other teams (i.e. build for their own usage). I hope to see FRC make this interface legal for single-team use, as Electrical Engineering in FRC hasn't really delved much further than 'plug the thing in the thing'.
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As someone who made a serious MXP board last year, I can give you a bit of info on how things went for us. We made the decision to passively pass the 10 PWM signals from PWM ports 0-9 through a board with active circuitry on it for power regulation and a gyro. This held the board more securely and gave us nice latching connectors for the PWM ports. We even had a very clear 1/4" wide section of board where there were no traces. We talked with FIRST, sent them our schematic, and were unable to get the board approved for use by our team. They agreed with us that there should be no issue given the schematic but were unable to make exceptions. And this was for a board with nothing active in the control path. We were able to make the board pass inspection by physically separating the PWM part of the board from the rest of the board.
Electrical engineering in FIRST is pretty limiting mostly due to the safety involved. You can do some pretty cool stuff with sensors though. Back in the cRIO days, we ran a BeagleBone Black with a custom cape to interface with sensors and run our control logic. We had boost-buck voltage regulators to keep the board up through the whole match. We also had a micro-controller to count encoder pulses and interface with our gyro on the custom cape.
Sorry to rain on your parade.