FRC Blogged - The 2015 Control System Request for Proposa

[Gdeaver]

I think everyone is is forgetting just how much the FPGA does on the robot controller. Most arm socs have at most 2 hardware quadrature encoder channels and limited counter timers. Also the modules that plug into the C-Rio have significant protections built in. One thing I always hoped NI would comment on was how much was lost by having the WPI layer to support Windriver and Java. If NI only had to support Labview and they had control of everything, how much different would the system be? Could we have been able to use their Can module? Would the system been more robust? This is important. If the the awarded company does not have total control of the system and there are many entities involved, then the chance of problems goes up. If the system has to support many software environments, then the problems increase and support becomes a nightmare. The power PC chip is an old man in the processor world and Intel, AMD, Via, N'vidia all have cutting edge solutions. Who in the market has a commercial product shipping today with the robustness of the C-rio and modern hardware that we can afford? I'm drawing a blank. The one thing that complicates the whole First system is machine vision. How do we support it. It's the most hardware demanding thing that we do.