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Unread 23-06-2002, 23:01
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Re: Serious Controller Ideas

Posted by Rick Berube, Engineer on team #121, Rhode Warriors, from Middletown H.S..

Posted on 5/22/99 10:56 PM MST


In Reply to: Serious Controller Ideas posted by Joe Johnson on 5/15/99 7:02 PM MST:




Joe,

I like the modular approach and the isolation of the power electronics from the processor. Consider the Motorola 683xx series of controllers for the task of receiver controller. I think it has more than enough 'bang-for-the-buck'. More specifically, check out the 68PM302 and 68EN302/MC68160 pair. They provide ethernet/PCMCIA support? How about high-level language, operating system and BDM debugging support?
The 683xx series is 68K based and is surrounded by all sorts of peripheral goodies like interrupts, A/Ds and high speed timers, etc. Regardless of the micro selected, if you mount it on a mezzanine card, and add your 'black-box' design for relays and switches, you have the makings of an upgradable controller box. Good for many years to come. You'll need more receiver horsepower to utilize the LAN idea anyway.

Ok. NOW FOR A REALITY CHECK. with a more powerful contoller and functional system comes a price. And I'm not talking about monetary value either! We must ensure no one gets left in the dust trying to make use of this wonderful new controller. We (read the FIRST software community) need to get together and establish a development 'environment'.
The beauty of the Basic Stamp was its easy of use and readily available support. Will the formation of a 'GNU-like' consortium be needed, or will it this all fall upon FIRST shoulders? how steep will the learning curve be to program this new controller? remember you only have a few weeks to master the beast and get it to jump thru hoops.

To simplify the task of programming the beast with all these new features, we'll need consider (amoung others):
1)publishing a library of software accesible to all (and complete with source code)
2)writting a FIRST executive (a mircokernel by any other name). We need to ensure user programs cannot execute outside the saftey boundries established by FIRST (I'm to old to chace runaway robots. the concept of priveledged(FIRST)/user(your team)tasks works well here.
3)writting a new default program is needed to provide basic functionality, and a place to start for more advanced programs. if my team doesn't have a programmer, this is my only recourse.
4)let's not forget the need for a new transmitter and some PC software (if we're going to use this new system to its fullest potential we'll need the tools to do it). teams will need a place to start to make use of all these new features.
5)oh yeah. I almost forgot. Last but not least, we need a ton of documentation (luckily something we all love to do We'll have to develop an Application Programmers Interface document so everyone knows what is available and how to used it. How many man hours do you think something like would take?

Don't get me wrong, I too would like more controller features at my disposal. But be careful what you ask for, you may just get it.
There is a great deal of work here. A significant hardware & software undertaking for sure. It would surly be a challenge to come up with a design which adds all this functionaly while minimizing the complexity which normally accompanies such systems.

I bet Eric is having trouble trying to estimate how all this will impact his customer support hours (not!).


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