That would be great. there really really isn't even a need for a rtos if they stick with the current approach of 2 processors. (a user configurable and a hard coded one). But then again, from a hardware standpiont, an rtos would be more economical because it involves less components. I really have the feeling though, that all we will see is like a change to a jstamp, BasicX or something else like that.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
pretend this is the start of a new post.
Quote:
Originally posted by FreeBSDboy
Some food for thought.
I have programmed autonomous robots on motorola HC processors for some of my classes when I was a junior in college. It is not a trivial step up from pbasic.
It's not so much learning the C language that would give the most problems, but rather I'd say it would be the seting up of and writing to registers and using interrupts that would be the most challenging aspect. There are a lot of difficult things that the basic stamps / pbasic make very easy to acomplish.
An example would be PWM output on the HC series. You need to have a good understanding of the real time clock and how real time interrupts work in order to get it to function properly. And it is much easier to accidently destroy your motor controlers and servos by screwing up the PWM programming- to the extent that it would be handy to have use of an oscilliscope for diagnostic purposes.
While I am sure that many of the veterans and the more tech savy teams would greatly appriciate such added control over the control system (I know I wouldn't mind it), you have to keep in mind that it also has to be simple enough for rookie teams and beginners to be able to pick up reasonably quickly, which pbasic allows.
So just some food for thought. Not everyone would be appriciative of a control system with a large learning curve. I'm confident that First and IFI will take all this into account if/when they decide to tackle the issue. And I would hypothesize that any changes to the control system would take the form of expanded capabilities without loosing sight of these issues.
Just my perspective. I hope I could shed some light on the topic.
[edited for minor gramatical errors - whoops!]
|
Thats why they offload the PWM and other duties such as enable/disable to another processor, so your code is runnign in a "sandbox". Also i found the lack of interrupts to be a limitation rather that a good thing. As far a setting up and writing to registers, FIRST could provide example code an libraries to do all the grunt work for the unexperienced teams.