FRC Blogged - The 2015 Control System Request for Proposa

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

A couple interesting requests for the new controller that I noticed

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Those would all be nice improvements to our current robot controller.

The current cRIO does have user accessible flash memory.

The current cRIO can send all that information via visual means connected to GPIO or I2C on the robot even when disabled.
Someone would just have to make something to do it. Display devices could easily include: LEDs, a backlit LCD, light bulbs, low voltage electro-florescent displays.

There is no USB 2.0 Host support on the cRIO but you could put a COTS device on the robot like a laptop. However, I'm not sure that part is really a slam dunk. USB has 3 common modes: Human Interface Device (HID), mass storage, and CDC (serial communications). Each mode is rather complicated. Generally when you plug devices into a host port there needs to be a driver for that device. No driver means no support. So even if you could make a USB 2.0 Host port you'd need software support in the control system to make it work with devices. That's *a whole lot of devices*. Usually things that don't run Windows/Linux/BSD/Mac OSX have to be selective about the USB hardware that actually works. After all what's the benefit to the device manufacturer to make drivers for your unusual low sale volume platform (<10,000 teams...Microsoft can give that away and basically did with the Kinectx).