Worried about cRIO CPU usage when using vision

[Greg McKaskle]

When discussing using laptops for vision, here are a few things to keep in mind.

The camera and cRIO are enet devices. They are already on a network with the dashboard. A laptop on the robot will be on the network too. The networks are different, but not as black and white as it may seem.

As discussed in other threads, you will gain yourself some additional CPU, but you will soon use that up too. Yesterday, I ran a team's dashboard that pegged my core 2 duo laptop with a 640x480 image stream. I could only process 20fps and they were sending 30. This resulted in seconds of lag.

Think about this as a budgeting exercise. Can you determine what is possible with the CPU resources in the cRIO? If you add more CPU, what will it be used for? What will it cost in $ and lbs?

There are certainly tasks that will benefit from adding a laptop, but it is not magic. It should really follow the same process as adding a motor or pneumatics.

Greg McKaskle