RoboRio + Beaglebone Black

[amesmich]

Hi all,

I am not an expert on the subject I am askign about but I knwo a bit abou it and have some experience with arduino. My question is there instructions or a method to connect a beaglebone black to the roborion through the expension port?

I know andymark sells the Rioduino http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-2996.htm but I was looking for pore power than an arduin UNO which is what is on that. I know it spossible I was just wondering if there was a standard method.

Our lead programer had some concerns that I was not able to speak to. We will have 6 encoders on our bot and will be running a mecanum drive with a gyro and an accelerometer. With all the other functions we have the concern was the delay in processing all the information interfearing with the operation of the drive. I am sure this has been discussed.

Does this sound reasonable with the new roborio, or will someone say "what the heck are you doing that you need more processing power"

Ideally we would liek to use the beaglebone for either the encoders or the gyro and accelerometer. Thought, ideas, info? Any insight is appreciated. Thanks.

[Greg McKaskle]

The decoding of the encoder pulses and the accumulation of the gyro are done in the FPGA. They are hard-real-time and take no CPU. The remaining work, scaling the values and putting them into the WPILib format, is trivial.

My suggestion would be to hook all of the sensors up on a test bench and measure it. I think you'll find that you have nothing to worry about and you do not need to complicate things by throwing other dedicated processors on the robot.

If you have questions, or more detailed concerns about meeting timing on some sensor, please post the details.

Greg McKaskle

[amesmich]

Wow, thanks so much. Thats where I didnt know the architecture of the system. FPGA makes sense. Thansk so much.

[fovea1959]

I agree with Greg about whether or not you probably *need* another processor for that.

That being said, if you *do* need/want an offboard processor, the new control system has UDP available to us (I believe we did not have that for Java in previous years).

One of our students coded up a neat little threaded UDP receiver (lifted from a threaded "Quote Server" tutorial, Google for it) on our roboRIO. We were able to send data using 'socat' on the Raspberry PI, and start and stop commands on the roboRIO using the received data.

If you use a Linux based offboard, make sure you install avahi so that you have access to the 'roboRIO-nnnn.local' mDNS names.