Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
Respectfully, I honestly don't think your opinions are well founded either. There are at least a few people in this thread that have experience with the cRIO platform. I personally have experience... So I hope you believe that I might have some clue about this.
...it would be highly annoying to be forced to interface with custom sensors or encoders using fixed rate sampling...
I will agree that any opinion on how things will turn out in the 2009 season is entirely premature. ... The fact that the nature and utility of the FPGA code is still undetermined frankly makes me nervous. The fact that the development environments are still under development highly worries me. I do appreciate your willingness to discuss the nitty gritty of the RTOS and such with us, but since we don't know what sort of high speed or interrupt based processing we'll be needing on the RTOS nor what the structure of the code will be, I don't think I can ask any intelligent questions.
I think a lot of this angst and annoyance could have been taken care of if this system was closer to a prototype of the system going out to teams and farther from a demo piece put together by NI to sell us on the system. I know I would have been fine with more man hours spent on these TBD features and less man-hours spent on a pretty holonomic robot with a sponge canon and flashy interface that still on bears a resemblance to the environment and hardware we'll be working with.
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Kudos for your FPGA-robotics experience at the graduate level. I'm not intending to question your technical abilities. The people defining the content of the FPGA are also familiar with robotics, but they are also focussing on what FIRST wants in their robotics competition, which may not be at the graduate research level. The different goals from the thousands of mentors and students will certainly keep this interesting, that is for sure.
If it helps at all, the FPGA image used by the four of the five robots shown in Atlanta was the alpha revision of the image slated to be given to teams. It has changed little in the last few months. It can't really be complete until all HW control and sensor choices for the KOP are determined, and as the SW wrappers for exposing the functionality to teams are being completed, they may also influence the FPGA slightly. By the way, I think four of the robots were also using the current WPI libraries. They are not quite complete, but I feel they are progressing nicely. Alpha typically means in use by internal customers, so if not alpha, they are close to that level of completeness.
The development tools, by the way, are off the shelf. They are being modified by adding libraries, and providing optional simplified UI settings in Eclipse and LV to waste less of the six weeks with rarely used advanced features. The tools have been used extensively getting ready for Atlanta.
The fifth robot, NItro, was indeed a bit of a show-off, but fundamentally was experimenting with alternate motor controllers, advanced motion options utilizing the FPGA, more applied vision processing, etc. It is unlikely to be an 09 FPGA, but is the eyes-to-the-future experimentation that will have the effect on the FPGA that you are looking for. So, while it may have seemed more flashy than needed, it served a purpose for the technical development as well.
I'll be the first to admit that my opinions aren't that well founded. That is why I'm following this list and talking to mentors in Atlanta -- looking for insight. I'm getting quite a bit, some from yourself and other vocal mentors, some from less experienced students. I'm also seeing lots of hand-wringing, and guessing as to the solution.
Personally, I'd find it much more useful if some of this energy were directed into a technical wish-list. Then both FIRST and the staff working on the project could measure the current 09 project against various expectations.
I'm sure you understand that details about the project can't and shouldn't be shared until FIRST is ready to divulge them. So, unanswered questions don't necessarily mean bad things. My personal expectations for the 09 season is that you will indeed feel limited by the elements in the kit. It is, after all, intended to meet the needs of many individuals who do not have the technical knowledge that you do. I also believe that it will hold many nice surprises for you, both in 09 and especially in future years as this very flexible system is allowed to be fully utilized. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing what both the novice teams and the advanced teams are able to accomplish with it.
Once again, myself and other people working on the project will attempt to answer good questions when it is appropriate.
Greg McKaskle