A portion of this discussion brought up whether NI was donating the cRIOs to teams.
The press release from April deals with that aspect of the discussion. The complete post is at --
http://digital.ni.com/worldwide/bwco...25742b00737df5
The third paragraph --
Quote:
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NI is granting a multimillion dollar in-kind donation over the next five years to FIRST to provide the CompactRIO system to participating teams. Several key technology suppliers have collaborated with NI to provide in-kind donations of components required to build the CompactRIO control system. These industry-leading technology companies include Altera, Analog Devices, Boston Engineering, ChipX, Dove Electronics, Freescale, MSI, Texas Instruments, TTI, Westak, Wind River, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Xilinx. Their support is helping NI to supply a leading-edge, highly sophisticated embedded platform equivalent to the most advanced industrial systems.
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An in-kind donations is not cash, more like coupons, and it isn't just NI, but many other companies donations that are allowing this to take place.
Concerning reuse, the cRIO connectors are quite different from the friction fit of the previous system. The chassis is held by at most two fasteners, and the modules are clipped in. Disconnecting the chassis and leaving the modules attached to the robot is very quick. The next layer of connects, on the modules, are mostly D-sub based, and also quick to reconnect. Over the coming months, I assume many teams will come up with strategies for quickly putting the computing "engine" back into the robot with little to no rewiring. A backup of code images to install over enet is another important piece needed to put a robot into a different robot.
Anyway, I'm not trying to lobby one way or the other about the reuse. I'm pointing out that the cRIO mechanical design does make reuse much easier to accomplish, though.
Greg McKaskle