[jhersh]

Originally Posted by qnetjoe

1.) could someone please give us the name of the Project Head at both FIRST and NI. I am a member of the Colorado FIRST planning committee, president of Colorado School of Mines Robotics Club and a long time FRC mentor. We have a great relationship with our Regional NI sales office and have all the resources to do a mentor workshop on the new control system, but we need to know more about certain things (like access to the Digital Sidecar) so we are able to do such a workshop. Myself and many other are more than willing to sign a NDA. It is frustrating to say the least of the politics inside of NI and FIRST are cutting good people off at the knees. BTW I called FIRST on Monday (4/21) and they told me NI had nothing to do with the new control system, even after the announcement. go figure

Wow... I'm surprised to hear the response from FIRST... guess they were just in the habit. I'm afraid the only project head is at FIRST, since FIRST owns the new control system. NI is a supplier to FIRST and is working closely with FIRST to provide them with everything they need.

Please don't lump FIRST politics onto NI. Sorry about your knees.

Originally Posted by qnetjoe

2.) Encoder interfaces galore - I would love to see 8-10 encoder interfaces. It would be really nice if some of the encoder interfaces had upper and lower limit switch support. In our lab we setup 9403 channels as follows:

8 x RC-PWM outputs
8 x quadture encoder inputs (channels 0-7)
4 x upper and lower limit switches (mapped to channels 4-7)

Currently in our 2008 bot we used 6 encoders (4 channels had upper/lower limit switches), but that could of easily been 8 if we chose to use a Mecanum drive.

Sounds like a nice setup. Are you controlling a robot with it? I'm curious if there is actually any hardware interaction between the limit switches and the encoder inputs. If so, please describe it.

Originally Posted by qnetjoe

3.) More powerful sensors like gyros, accelerometer, ultra-sonics, laser range finders moved onto a communications bus (I2C, SPI or CAN). This will reduce pin count and if implemented correctly will allow for self diagnostics.

Are there any specific sensors that you are most interested in?

Originally Posted by qnetjoe

4.) Make a Radio modem cRIO module. - if implemented correctly inside of VxWorks it could be used to provide the supervisory control that FIRST needs while still granting us access full access to the FPGA

Perhaps you mean something like this?

Originally Posted by qnetjoe

5.) Migrate to using a cRIO module for motor control (NI 9505?)

The NI-9505 is not capable of high enough current to run drive train motors and consumes a slot in the chassis for each motor. Probably not the best use of slot real estate.

Originally Posted by qnetjoe

6.) let us use the NI 1742 - I love this thing!

You and me both. It's very cool.

Originally Posted by qnetjoe

7.) Larger cRIO Chassis maybe 12/16 Slot

Ah ha!... you were thinking of item number 5 above, eh?

Thanks for the comments,
-Joe