Quote:
Originally Posted by squirrel
I have trouble considering it to be a boat anchor...I have too much old tube gear laying around 
The cRio does have an interesting design, not quite how I would do it, but it takes up far less real estate on our electronics board than the power distribution and speed controllers do, as usual. We took the time to figure out how to mount the cRio down low, with the connections easily accessible, and it really wasn't a size/weight issue at all. |
Glad to hear someone has a normal boat that can't be held in place by 929 grams.
Anyway, to explain what was in the NI booth, we actually had three generations of the cRIO. The drop test was the original generation of modular system. It consists of a cpu module, a backplane module, and the I/O modules. The backplane has the FPGA and comes in four and eight slot sizes. This rectangular packaging allowed the controller to fly to around 4000 ft in a rocket -- slides into the tube like a loaf of bread along with the battery.
The FRC cRIO is called the integrated unit. It is lower weight and lower cost because the cpu and backplane are integrated into one PCB. It wasn't officially released when discussions about its use began.
The third generation on demo is often referred to as the single board RIO. It has the module connectors on the edges to flatten the product from a loaf of bread into a pizza, and in fact doesn't come with a housing since it is designed to be integrated into a cabinet on large machinery, etc. This product was also under development when discussions began, but wouldn't be released early enough, doesn't have an enclosure, etc.
Greg McKaskle