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Originally Posted by Gdeaver
I'm curious as to why there is a need for a powerful coprocessor. I can see using a small PIC for a sensor that requires I2Cc or SPI interface since we don't have access to the hardware on the robot controller. This year the camera certainly didn't overwhelm the processor. There are more limitations in the actual camera hardware and firmware. So why the need for a powerful
coproc? Are our games complex enough to justify one?
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Omni style drive systems can be. Also this year, if you threw PID loops on shooters and drivetrain, exponential joystick smoothing, pots on turret elevation and rotation, light sensors for ball indexing, accelerometers for traction control and auto, camera running a turret constantly, had a killough omni drive, and tried to run it all really fast without using any look-up tables, you might run out of power. (Or have to slow down response times) Hence, the offboard processor. In fact, if you learned to use it in the offseason, the offboard processor might speed up your programming, by letting you do quick and dirty solutions instead of having to optimize.