Jaguars vs Victors

[Joe Johnson]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Joe,
We really need to get together and talk. Are you up for a challenge? I have an assignment you might be interested in.
Al

Right now I am getting my team ready for BU in 22 days, but after that, yeah, maybe.

As to those who say teams have invested bucks in all the crazy quilt hardware that is required to make the current system function, FIRST can always grandfather that hot mess in for a few years. But seriously, this current system is far from free. It cost a lot of money (and labor not to mention blood, sweat, and tears) to wire up all these distributed devices.

And for what? Not much in my humble opinion.

Think about it. If FIRST wants to keep the router on the robot morphology, then this box could be ethernet device. Just like the Jaguars, they could force the device to prove it is running an approved version of firmware and then have that firmware shut everything off if an enable message that only FIRST approved software can generate (although rumor has it that folks have broken the Jaguar protocol -- in theory a reasonably secure system could be designed, we are not running military hardware here -- there is not a lot of benefit to someone being able to spoof the enable/disable signal on a FIRST robot).

Once you have that box on board your robot, you can have basically any controller you want on your robot. Put a Pandaboard on board, or a PC or a CRIO or an IFI system. Do whatever you want. All the IO that matters is controlled by FIRST.

This is SO doable.

Joe J.