[cdawzrd]

I have opened up an OI after someone spilled soda all over it and I cleaned it out. It is an old one so we're not that worried about not being able to get it repaired on warranty... I think the soda pretty much killed that :-)

Anyway, I, not being an EE, didn't get much info out of the OI except for there being at least one microprocessor.

Keep in mind, my goal here is making something functional for an off-season competition, not duplicating what IFI does. That means, I would prefer to make it wired directly into an interface, not with single-board computers as AC's with ethernet...as cool as that would be.

What i was thinking:
-Each OI gets a comp-port cable that goes back to a game controller. This would be the _only_ control device (apart from computers). This would tie together the disable/autonomous from each one and interface with a computer, either with a serial driver or with another IFI-RC talking to a PC through its program port (those RC's are the most useful pieces of hardware I've ever seen).

There would be two computers networked. One would be running a display program I am working on, outputting a color-keyed fullscreen display of time and scores to a video mixer/projector. The other computer would be running the control program that would network with the display computer and the field controller, telling it when to disable and autonomous-enable the various robots. That in itself would be enough, but for one problem:

Radio channels.

I could ask each team to go through the process of setting the MSB of the team number and then assign them a radio channel, but it would be so much nicer to set it remotely. Unfortunately, that might only be accomplished through another IFI-proprietary data stream that would be extremely hard to decode without their help (kinda like the stream from the dashboard port).