[dcbrown]

It will be interesting to see what the new FTC controller really is. The announcement indicated its packaging is built on LEGO NXT which uses an AVR master processor (where io devices attach) and an ARM7 processor for user code. It would be unusual to keep the packaging but move away from the established architecture within the packaging although there will probably be inclusion of faster models of one or both of these chips. The specs on the ARM7 certainly seem to match the 10x memory and 38% faster specs released in the blog.

Currently, the LEGO NXT looks like it is set up to have all io devices plug into and be serviced by the AVR which is similar in architecture to the PIC - i.e. it has timers, ADC, io pins, etc. User written code gets put on the ARM processor which has none of these but does have a couple different methods of interacting with co-processors. With this type of architecture, it could make adding or creating your own sensors from industry available parts much more difficult (the AVR is not currently user accessible, but that is where h/w gets attached).

If so, then this is both a move forward but also possibly a significant change in terms of software programming environments... which is why until details are released there is a lot of angst and guesswork.

If true, then you will end up with two camps: those that love it because now they don't have to worry about all those pesky hardware sensor devices as both the h/w and s/w for the devices are provided & hidden from the programmer, and those that hate it for the exact opposite reason. I'm in the "hate it" group becuase its a shift from systems programmer (me) to application programmer by adding another layer of abstraction and isolation from the hardware.

Even when the FTC details are released after nationals, that will just fuel a 2nd round of speculation on what the new FRC controller architecture will look like. Since FTC kits have already been distributed to some teams, my guess is things might be tweaked but are probably pretty nailed down unless there is outright failure of teams to be able to utilize the kits.

BTW, the Gumstix uses an ARM Xscale processor w/MMU and there are two flavors of Linux ported to run on the ARM. My random guess is the FRC version may use an Xscale core so it can run a flavor of Linux and deliver multi-threading, etc. and turn us all into application programmers vs systems programmers. Many will see this is great news.

But all this is speculation and even after the FTC announcement, there will continue to be a huge unknown factor as to what the new FRC controller will really look like for months to come.