[Greg McKaskle]

The roboRIO has two cores and a modern linux scheduler. All processes and threads will be assigned to a processor core based on priority and history of execution. The default robot code doesn't use the entire roboRIO to execute, and in fact can be made much lighter and efficient if that is what the team chooses to do.

It is quite easy to consume an entire core on any computer by writing one loop without a wait or delay of some sort. At that point, you can add more cores or fix the problem.

There are intentionally many ways to approach the vision processing challenge, and the tradeoffs are as team-based as technical. I fully expect to see awesome processing based on the DB laptop, based on coprocessors, and based on just the roboRIO. None of these are, in my opinion, a bad approach. And of course there are teams who will solve the challenge with no camera at all.

By the way, the DS shows you the CPU trace of the roboRIO in realtime. Just click on the second or third tab on the right side. This info is also logged and can be reviewed using the Log File Viewer after a practice or a match. If the robot feels sluggish, you can try to identify if it was because you maxed the CPU or something else.

Greg McKaskle