[BB]: Beta Hardware

[EricH]

For those that want a look at Gen 2 of the control system driver's station: http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/2009...-shipping.html

It goes to some of the beta teams almost at once.

And there are some other items of interest, too.

[Chris is me]

Is that a USB E-stop button?

(Anyone notice "Team 111" on the driver station? Peculiar.)

Excited to test new shiny equipment with what looks like live camera feedback.

[AdamHeard]

I just hope that's not an app running inside an OS...

We're getting a bit far from KISS ifi interface I loved so much.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

(Anyone notice "Team 111" on the driver station? Peculiar.)

Interesting to us too. We weren't involved in the new DS (this picture is the first we've seen of it), so I guess someone at FIRST randomly chose our team number for testing.

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

I just hope that's not an app running inside an OS...

Looks like a labview app to me. There's no real way that you could run something as complicated as a Classmate without an OS. I certainly understand your concern though - a reboot of the Classmate could take longer than the whole match.

[IndySam]

OK electronics guys, whats the board hooked into the USB port?

[Allison]

Originally Posted by IndySam

OK electronics guys, whats the board hooked into the USB port?

You mean the breadboard (white board) or the fancy board that is making us capable of using custom circuits?

I am happy to see the size is still manageable. I hope power is going to provided on the field as a standard in case someone doesn't charge their batteries.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by IndySam

OK electronics guys, whats the board hooked into the USB port?

A guess only, but my assumption is that that's a board which allows you to hook up analog and digital signals, i.e. the equivalent of the analog and digital I/O on last year's DS.

[Cory]

Can we have IFI back now?

This is the new driver station? Seriously?

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by Cory

Can we have IFI back now?

This is the new driver station? Seriously?

Seems kind of kludgy, not to mention bootup times on the Classmate.

What was wrong with the 09 Driver Station? It wasn't perfect, but it wouldn't have been that hard to fix.

[eitang]

From the picture is seems to be a Intel Clamshell classmate so here are the specs for it:

http://www.classmatepc.com/where-to-...ll/tech-specs/

I also noticed that the Wifi indicator is lit, could this mean that we don't need to use a router any more?

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by eitang

I also noticed that the Wifi indicator is lit, could this mean that we don't need to use a router any more?

Oh, that's an interesting observation. If somehow the disable button, the circuitry on the right (which I assume is for custom inputs like pots), and the USB hub were all integrated together into one box, I would take back my previous post calling it "kludgy."

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by eitang

I also noticed that the Wifi indicator is lit, could this mean that we don't need to use a router any more?

Does the classmate have 802.11n 5GHZ?

[Abrakadabra]

Jared and Joe:

I want to thank you guys for taking the high road and pointing out all the obvious advantages that this new DS system has over anything that has come before.

<soapbox>

It is amazing to me how some people on this thread are reacting so negatively to change. Not just this year, but even last year, where the benefits of the new control system were even more obvious, it was the same folks making the same complaints. And again, they were generally doing all their griping before all the details were known.

It is even more amazing to me that these people represent teams that have built their reputation on building state-of-the-art, cutting edge robots. Honestly, I really have to wonder how much better these teams might be if they didn't have to deal with so much negativity in their midst.

Sorry guys, but requiring today's students to have an understanding of assembly language, or knowing how to build their own outboard processor, much less how to cram an image processing algorithm into 4K of RAM, is just not going to cut it anymore. I applaud FIRST for making a such a valiant effort to provide us with the latest technology, and at a reasonable price.

</soapbox>

PS - I'm with Jared on the software - that picture doesn't look like LabView to me. I'm betting it's a simple window system running on some sort of stripped-down Linux distro. I'm also betting that for safety (as well as a bunch of other) reasons, we may not have a whole lot of leeway to modify the DS software itself. Possibly a binary library with a published API for panel customization. But we shall see soon enough...

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Abrakadabra

<soapbox>

It is amazing to me how some people on this thread are reacting so negatively to change. Not just this year, but even last year, where the benefits of the new control system were even more obvious, it was the same folks making the same complaints. And again, they were generally doing all their griping before all the details were known.

They're not the same complaints (e.g. last year they didn't go "but what if KwikByte makes an inferior DS that dies to static discharge that you have to void your warranty to fix?").

It is even more amazing to me that these people represent teams that have built their reputation on building state-of-the-art, cutting edge robots. Honestly, I really have to wonder how much better these teams might be if they didn't have to deal with so much negativity in their midst.

I think the success of such teams does more to say the benefits of "negativity" (e.g constructive criticism, an incredibly useful tool for any engineering project) rather than "wow the poofs would do so much better without that Negative Nancy!". I mean, if they weren't skeptical and negative, then teams would try to do ridiculous things that would never work because no one criticized them. Criticism is a GOOD thing, if it is constructive.

Hell, without criticism, we'd have the same static death boxes with unreliable pins and Ethernet ports that we do now. And no free laptop in the KoP

Sorry guys, but requiring today's students to have an understanding of assembly language, or knowing how to build their own outboard processor, much less how to cram an image processing algorithm into 4K of RAM, is just not going to cut it anymore. I applaud FIRST for making a such a valiant effort to provide us with the latest technology, and at a reasonable price.

</soapbox>

From an engineering standpoint, if you can get away with a cheaper, more ancient solution then it's inefficient to go with a more expensive one that effectively does the same thing... and I think that's what a lot of IFI fans think, that the current system, while it has its benefits, isn't so much better that it can outdo IFI for FIRST (not to mention basic stuff like reliability, which since you're paying for a product you should complain about when stuff doesn't work).

Sorry for soapboxing as well, but I think to certain extents criticism should be encouraged so that FIRST can make a better product, and your post made it seem like ALL criticism is bad, which is not the right approach.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Abrakadabra

Sorry guys, but requiring today's students to have an understanding of assembly language, or knowing how to build their own outboard processor, much less how to cram an image processing algorithm into 4K of RAM, is just not going to cut it anymore.

You know, as a software engineer I have to comment on this one. Sure, technology has moved a long way from these things, but I can tell you with certainty that the best software engineers that I personally work with all know how to work with assembly language. Saying that we shouldn't bother with teaching that any more because technology has moved on is just as short-sighted as saying that there's no point in teaching kids how to do arithmetic or calculus by hand since there's calculators available that can do the work for them.

Having said that, you're exaggerating the difficulty of working with the IFI system dramatically. I consider my team to be one of the most advanced users of the control system, and we never wrote a single line of assembly code. I know many powerhouse teams that have never built an offboard processor. You're just making stuff up to make your own position sound better.

They may think it was "bulletproof", but what they often forget is that it was a very daunting platform for most kids who were probably encountering their first embedded programming platform, usually without any kind of expert guidance, and certainly with very little entry-level documentation.

I'm amazed that you'd try to use this as an argument. You must not have gone through the unbelievable hassle and headache that was the process of setting up WindRiver for the new control system last year. Our team has experts who work with VxWorks, WindRiver, and various RTOSes and debuggers every day, and yet it still took us hours to get things installed and configured correctly. And even then, WindRiver would randomly not work at times, or lose the connection to the target, etc. Comparing the approachability of the IFI system versus the new control system is probably not a good idea if you're trying to make a case that the new one is better. Just go look at the numerous threads from last year around kickoff of all the people that had issues setting up their system, getting software installed, etc.