On Board Computer

[yottabyte]

I have seen some teams mount min itx computer on their robots. I would like to know how you would hook it up and what are some of the uses of one.

[dcarr]

We used it for image processing this year. We had a Kinect plugged into the onboard PC (consisting of a Zotac ITX motherboard with a dual-core Atom 330 and an SSD), image data was sent back to an applet running on the driver station where the driver could line up the target, get the distance, and then the wheel speed for the shooter would be calculated. Some teams did great image processing by using the Axis camera and doing all the processing on the driver station, but there certainly are some nice benefits to doing it all on the robot (one of them being that you can use the Kinect on the robot) and we hope to improve our system in the future as well.

[yottabyte]

Originally Posted by dcarr

We used it for image processing this year. We had a Kinect plugged into the onboard PC (consisting of a Zotac ITX motherboard with a dual-core Atom 330 and an SSD), image data was sent back to an applet running on the driver station where the driver could line up the target, get the distance, and then the wheel speed for the shooter would be calculated. Some teams did great image processing by using the Axis camera and doing all the processing on the driver station, but there certainly are some nice benefits to doing it all on the robot (one of them being that you can use the Kinect on the robot) and we hope to improve our system in the future as well.

Thanks. But how did you power it? Did you use a pc power supple connected to the pd board or something else?

[AcesJames]

Originally Posted by yottabyte

Thanks. But how did you power it? Did you use a pc power supple connected to the pd board or something else?

The simplest way to power an onboard PC would be with a DC/DC PicoPSU. It's much lighter and smaller than a standard PSU.

Here's one you could use.

http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-150-XT

It attaches above the motherboard's 24 pin socket. You would then strip the leads that are meant to go to an AC converter (laptop power brick) and plug those into a 12v on the NI PD Board. Simple as that.

[yottabyte]

Originally Posted by AcesJames

The simplest way to power an onboard PC would be with a DC/DC PicoPSU. It's much lighter and smaller than a standard PSU.

Here's one you could use.

http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-150-XT

It attaches above the motherboard's 24 pin socket. You would then strip the leads that are meant to go to an AC converter (laptop power brick) and plug those into a 12v on the NI PD Board. Simple as that.

thanks

[dcarr]

The Zotac board that we used (http://www.zotacusa.com/zotac-ion-it...onitx-t-u.html) accepted a 19volt input so we just got a 12 to 19 volt power supply, very clean setup. Avoids dealing with the 24 pin atx connector to begin with

[daniel_dsouza]

Is a board like this also a viable idea? Our team was thinking about building an onboard computer, and we wanted to keep things on the cheap. There is a $400 limit after all.

Also, will there be any problems with bootup time? The last thing I want is to turn our robot on, and have the FTA giving our team weird looks every match because windoze is taking it's sweet time.

[Kyler Hagler]

You could always just do your image processing on your C-rio? I believe we did that and didn't have a problem but your just have to have like absolutely as much off load on the cpu on board so that the cpu can actually do it. This resorted to us using 2CAN and integrated PID loops on the Jaguars them selves.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by KylerHagler

You could always just do your image processing on your C-rio? I believe we did that and didn't have a problem but your just have to have like absolutely as much off load on the cpu on board so that the cpu can actually do it. This resorted to us using 2CAN and integrated PID loops on the Jaguars them selves.

That's not necessarily true. Reconsider how you perform your image processing. It's perfectly reasonable to process a single frame to get all the information you need to lock on to the target and shoot accurately.

Vision processing does not necessarily mean processing vision in real-time, at real-time speeds. That is a mistake many programmers make. In fact, I can tell you that most manufacturing vision systems we have in our production lines use the single-frame method.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

Vision processing does not necessarily mean processing vision in real-time, at real-time speeds. That is a mistake many programmers make. In fact, I can tell you that most manufacturing vision systems we have in our production lines use the single-frame method.

Yup. We grabbed one frame, processed it in about 100ms, then fed the result into a control loop using the gyro. We were even able to pull out our lateral position on the field to shoot off center if we were on the side of the key, allowing us to have an accurate alliance bridge autonomous mode. We did this spending 0 dollars and 0 hours on an external computer.

[Brian Selle]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

Yup. We grabbed one frame, processed it in about 100ms, then fed the result into a control loop using the gyro. We were even able to pull out our lateral position on the field to shoot off center if we were on the side of the key, allowing us to have an accurate alliance bridge autonomous mode. We did this spending 0 dollars and 0 hours on an external computer.

That's exactly what we did except we fed turret position. The cRIO CPU would spike to around 80-90% for a moment during the image processing but since nothing else was happening during the shot sequence it was never an issue. Never saw the need for continuous image processing or offloading to an external CPU...

[Kyler Hagler]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

That's not necessarily true. Reconsider how you perform your image processing. It's perfectly reasonable to process a single frame to get all the information you need to lock on to the target and shoot accurately.

Vision processing does not necessarily mean processing vision in real-time, at real-time speeds. That is a mistake many programmers make. In fact, I can tell you that most manufacturing vision systems we have in our production lines use the single-frame method.

My bad, Btslaser knows more about this then i do. We did do a frame method instead of real time processing.

[yottabyte]

Originally Posted by daniel_dsouza

Is a board like this also a viable idea? Our team was thinking about building an onboard computer, and we wanted to keep things on the cheap. There is a $400 limit after all.

Also, will there be any problems with bootup time? The last thing I want is to turn our robot on, and have the FTA giving our team weird looks every match because windoze is taking it's sweet time.

thanks for the suggestion but in I think I would go with a mini itx board to keep space down

[yottabyte]

about the role of keeping each part under $400 does this mean keeping the combined total of the cpu motherboard ssd and ram under $400 or keeping each part under the limit

[dcarr]

Our total was under $400 I recall, just the Zotac board + RAM + SSD should keep you under $400 no problem (and I'm pretty sure it would be counted each party individually anyway but I'm not completely sure).

Bootup time is very fast, under 30 seconds with an SSD, so plenty of time from when the FTAs have you power up the robot to when it's situated on the field ready to go.

IMHO you definitely want to go for a low-power, compact solution like Atom.