Quote:
Originally Posted by Coach Seb
I seen a lot of post about raspberry pi and its usage in FRC... Most posts are over my head as they are reffering to some support or coding example request.
Is there an actual post, white papers or other resources that "dummie" it down so I could understand what and how they are use?
Trying to learn, but yet to find a good resources showing what we could do with them.
Thanks a bunch!
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I feel your pain that it seems like the support all assume you know certain things, so I'm happy to help. I can't speak for every team, but mine is working on 2 different Pi based projects.
One is controlling an FRC robot off a pi. This is in less than an infancy stage and there is no progress to report. This wouldn't be used for competition, but would let us keep last year's robot in service for demos without buying more RoboRio's. And its also a potential teaching tool for rookies.
The second, and the one I'm working on and asking about here is using it as a vision coprocessor. This is for doing things like recognizing the retroflective tape around the goals in the Stronghold game. To accomplish the recognition, a camera has to take in the image, and the processor has to perform a number of filtering operations on it. This is a very computing intensive exercise, so doing it on board the RoboRio can slow down the whole Robot. By putting a Pi on as a coprocessor, the RoboRio can keep doing its robot thing, while the Pi does nothing but chew on image data. Here in this thread, I am looking for help with getting the processed data from the Pi to the RoboRio and useful in robot code. FRC pushes this method called Network Tables. It seems fairly straightforward but I'm still learning it myself. You basically call a function that says put this data into a network table with this name. Then in your robot code you call a function that says look for a network table with this name, and assign it to some variable.
If I'm still over your head, feel free to shoot me a private message and I would be happy to help further. Or visit team5401.org and email the team and ask for Kevin and I'll get it.