Why Windriver?

[Greg McKaskle]

I wanted to learn how to do all that low level stuff. I thought it was literally get a bunch of electrical components and soldering them together and making everything from scratch.

Because the robots are big and fast, it is no longer safe to take this approach for the entire system. My understanding is that quite a few teams work at the circuit level for the driver console and for some custom circuits on the robot. Also, the skills, and perhaps the shop you use for FIRST can be used to tinker with lower level circuits. Please don't combine those circuits with half-horsepower motors with other people around.

As for the openness of the libraries, the vision libs have a number of calls to copy the data into a low level data type, or even to hand you the pointer to the vision data structure. For LV, the VIs are IMAQ ImageToArray and IMAQ ArrayToImage.

Taken from the NIVision for LabWindowsCVI Function Reference Manual, for C, the functions are

void* imaqImageToArray(const Image* image, Rect rect, int* columns, int* rows);

Purpose
Creates a two-dimensional array from an image.

and

int imaqArrayToImage(Image* image, const void* array, int numCols, int numRows);

Purpose
Sets the pixels of an image to the values in a given array. This function resizes the image to the size of the source array.

If you are wanting to do this in Java, you'll likely find that you need to write a wrapper first. Model it after the other vision wrappers or ask for help.

Another way to go low level is to read the jpg from the tcp port. You have the low-level jpg encoding, and you can use other libraries such as the JPEG consortium's open code to decode and get at the pixels. I've spoken with several teams who wrote their own camera communication's lib, so it has been done before and is not closed.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with playing this year's game, but as long as you are doing that task as well and don't let down your teammates, these low-level side projects should be a fun diversion.

As for FIRSTs purpose -- read the web site. If FIRST was going to teach you to build a world-class robot, it would be a course or a degree, not a competition. You are exposed to many of the fundamental robotic topics, and hopefully are inspired to go further. If you accomplish a fraction of what you list and FIRST played a part, they met their goals. If you decide to do something totally different with your life, but recognize how important technical training and problem solving skills are, they have met their goals.

Greg McKaskle