Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
Well guys here goes...
I agree we as the FIRST community of students/mentors/teachers should
be consulted on such a critical change in the fundamental nature of
our robots operation.
I have experience using NI hardware in many of our systems at work and
its really good stuff ( and really expensive!) The problem here is that
NI is not an embedded house. There support is really good but they tend
to expect to talk to engineering types because that is the high caliber of
support people they have on the other end of the line. (Support agreements
do cost money in certain cases, if it is something they did wrong its no
charge.)
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I, too, have experiance with NI equipment. Believe me, their staff is well equipped to handle any level of technical difficulty. And with the amount of equipment that FIRST will be purchacing, a support agreement should be supplied. I trust FIRST to make sure on the support aspect of this deal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
The compact rio is definitely rugged serious stuff. Its all over the world but
heres where I have a problem.
I weighed the unit on the Archmedes inspections scales 3.5 pounds! 
You have to add at least 2 "handoff" boards which break out the 32I/O
module so you can use them. Oh then there is the "power board". In general
we are taking a unit that is supposed to have D connectors on it and trying
to remanufacture little modules that make it all look like standard 3 pin
pwm cable connectors. The analog module has an adaptor (FIRST DESIGNED)
to add the 5 volt bus back on so we keep the exisitng pwm analog plug. |
The weight is nothing but another engineering challange. And the adaptor boards are nothing but breakout boards, a standard in manufacturing automation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
The super power 400 mhz power pc is an asset to be assured and I was
getting pretty excited on the first day when they said we had the ability
to program the on board FPGA. The next day however we were told no that
isn't going to happen. The reason for probably taking it away was simple
no PWM control modules so they are using the FPGA to generate the pwm
signals. These are routed out through the 32 Digital I/O board to the
breakout board and finally to the Victors. ( yea they are still using them)
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More than likely FIRST is going to use the FPGA to have the DIO mimic PWM outputs. They also talked about on-board image recognicion (sp?) and OCR capabilities. Most likely these will be on the FPGA. FIRST may also include the data transmission encryption keys on the FPGA so that they will be much harder to be spoofed, and can be changed by pit admin with just a download.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
Bottom line guys is we have a ton of hardware being shoved into a
configuration that allows standard First parts to be plugged in. As you
have already seen we haven't even gotten to the radio link stuff.
I am not a fan of upconvertors for power if you can avoid them. The word
convertor means power loss. Its also means electrical noise.
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From what I've seen, the upconverter they use is high frequency and thus little noise generated.
I too am a bit concerned about the power loss and power consumption of the controller (as we haven't seen any data on that yet), but I will hold judgement on those until I see the datasheet for the unit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
The other HUGE PROBLEM here is we are taking NI's preferred path to
nirvana Labview. Its a language ( or picture grams ) designed to make it
easy for nonprogrammers to run instrumentation without knowing much.
This takes away from our students learning about embedded code and
sequential programming. Thats where the extra companies come in to
write a compiler so the students have the option to use C C++. There
is still the matter of converting Labview stuff to be callable by the new
compiled code. Are you seeing a pattern here? We are taking NI and trying
to convert it back into what we already have.
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Labview is as powerful as any other object orientated language. The fact that it's objects are depicted by pictographs instead of words does not change that. Labview can also import into it any API (created from C/C++/Pascal/VB/C# etc,etc,etc) ... the only issue is the base processor it is compiled for and the hardware specific calls.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
I thought well at least we will have access to NI's incredible Vision packge
VBAI which would finally allow our kids a great vision tool that is easy to
use but no we don't get that either. They are going to write something that
allows us access to some vision tools ( dont' know which ones).
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More than likely it'll be a stripped down version of NI Vision and will be imbedded into the FPGA
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
I really like NI. They are a great company and make great hardware that
is almost always callable by langauges like VB ( still the most popular
programming language that's in use), also callable from C++ but they only
support hardware support APIs. This is how we use it, not LABVIEW.
With no zoom feature on Labview ( they have promised this for years, its
there number one complaint from users on their list) Its hard to isolate
sections of the code to allows students to focus on a small part at a time.
Very hard to document since its all just pictures. I am very familiar with
labview and write an array of clusters with properties any day but this
is not what we should expose our students to at this time. Its great for
what its intended. Doing some instrumentation with graphing without much
knowledge.
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[sarcasm]
Oh my gosh,I've been doing it wrong all this time. I've been using LabView to control motion control systems for a manufacturing enviroment for the last 5 years. How could I have been so wrong
[/sarcasm]
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
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My assumption (yeah, I know what happends when you assume) is that we will be getting a stripped down version of this compiler, and that it will allow calls from C/C++ (but possibly not VB or Pascal)
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
With all the serious new embdedded hardware out there today there are
other options. Dean charges us with making the minds of tommorow
with the ability to solve the worlds problems. Its a lot easier to do that
when our students know they can buy the processor we use in an IFI
controller for less than 10 bucks and make the astounding machines they
make now. If we go this route they need to buy a 2000 dollar Compact
RIO to make a new IPOD?
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The IFI controller was $400.
We do not yet know the price of a second cRio, so for now I cannot comment on the value (or not)
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
And by the way where is the 3.5+ pounds coming from in our weight
budget? The wheels?
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Sounds like a challange to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
Sorry for the size of this post and but I want us to make some noise here so we as a community make this decision. I only hope the reason we are doing this isn't money based that NI is a large sponsor.(notice how small the
microchip sponsorship logo was on the banners at Einstein?)
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No problem about the size of your post. You have concerns (and valid ones at that ... I just disagree, but thats my opinion). CD is a place for these discussions.
NIs and
FIRSTs motivations should be questioned. As teachers/advisors/mentors we are charged with questioning things. However, in this case, I believe (my opinion) that you are reading too much into logo sizes and corporate shenanigains (although I'll be the first to say I can be wrong).
Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
If a moderator from FIRST is reading this please contact me. We need to
talk. You guys are trying to do the right thing. So are we.
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The above is JM(NS)HO