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Unread 07-05-2006, 14:39
Gdeaver Gdeaver is offline
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Re: IFI Control System (OI/RC) - The Future???

Current monitoring, limiting and protection is best done at the ESC. To do this the Victors would have to get smart and the PWM method of control would have to go. Then that brings up the subject of interfacing the ESC with some kind of buss. Then there is the problem of what buss, the clock rate of the buss, latency and the master slave-protocol. RS232, RS485, CAN what ever and the async nature would greatly change the way we program the RC no matter what form or processors are in it. No matter what form the OI/RC takes in the future I hope a graphical programming environment is included as an option to program the RC. Our team was a minimalistic effort this year. Mostly rookies and we used EASY-C. Programming was not a worry and in fact the robot code was mostly written and debugged between matches on Thurs. and Fri. The quick programming and prototyping of easy c allowed us to get things worked out and working well for Sat. Made it to the finals at PHIL. With MPLAB we would have been marginal.

One last comment. The radio modems are expensive. I'll mention it again. Zigbee modules offer the opportunity to integrate the RF and master proc in the RC and could be the whole OI and they offer allot of bang for the buck.