Ardruino and cRio

[O'Sancheski]

^Reported^

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by ajlapp

We used an Arduino in 2011 to read encoders and the transmit distance travelled during auton.

The Arduino directly read the encoders and talked to the cRIO via serial.

This worked great. We'll be doing another Aruino project in 2012.

Any reason you decided to use the Arduino for this purpose rather than jsut connecting the encoders directly to the cRIO?

[ajlapp]

Any reason you decided to use the Arduino for this purpose rather than jsut connecting the encoders directly to the cRIO?

We have included projects like this for the last few seasons to involve more students in programming for the robot and to add additional languages to our training program.

In most seasons we have about two students who really become the lead programmers for the comp robot. In order to sustain a larger group and have their work be meaningful we have added components like the Arduino.

We try to pick something useful yet achievable by a group of students with little oversight. Last year's encoder reading was a success, though we stopped using it before Worlds because of some unknown and possibly unrelated errors. Regardless those students were proud of their work and had a featured component on the robot that otherwise would not have existed.

In past year's, when we've had mentors with PCB design experience we have tried things like a hardware based PID board that used SPI to talk to the main controller.

This year we plan to use it the Arduino again, though the scope of the project isn't defined.

[Gdeaver]

I'm assuming you used the Arduino as a spi slave. You wouldn't happen to have a library for the Arduino as a slave that you could point to or share?

[theprgramerdude]

Originally Posted by ajlapp

We have included projects like this for the last few seasons to involve more students in programming for the robot and to add additional languages to our training program.

In most seasons we have about two students who really become the lead programmers for the comp robot. In order to sustain a larger group and have their work be meaningful we have added components like the Arduino.

We try to pick something useful yet achievable by a group of students with little oversight. Last year's encoder reading was a success, though we stopped using it before Worlds because of some unknown and possibly unrelated errors. Regardless those students were proud of their work and had a featured component on the robot that otherwise would not have existed.

In past year's, when we've had mentors with PCB design experience we have tried things like a hardware based PID board that used SPI to talk to the main controller.

This year we plan to use it the Arduino again, though the scope of the project isn't defined.

Why don't you have the students do a bit of software engineering as a team and have them all write code on the Crio alone, and simply break portions of it up into chunks that each student works on, rather than separating the platforms and making things more complicated?

[tap13]

Originally Posted by theprgramerdude

Can you be more specific? Do you mean, what you can add on to the board for more features like other wireless, or what you can attach and control/sense?

Well I guess both, honestly, I'm still learning and researching what an arduino is used for. I want to know if there is rules that I might need to know on what I can do and can't do on an arduino

[EricH]

Ah, the "what are the rules?" question.

Well, to be honest, we don't know the rules for 2012 yet. However, you may find Section 4.3.10 of the 2011 Game Manual interesting reading.

Now, that won't affect what can be attached to an Arduino for non-competition purposes. But if you're using it for FRC purposes, those rules governed what you could do in 2011 and may or may not be similar to the 2012 rules.