FRC Blogged - The 2015 Control System Request for Proposa

[BigJ]

Originally Posted by 1075guy

The cRIO is, and has been since its debut in 2009, a sledgehammer used to drive a finishing nail.

Simply put, FRC teams simply don't require the horsepower it provides.

Further to that, its excessive horsepower has enabled teams to get sloppy with their coding, resulting in 100% cpu usage, communication failures, and more.

Many FIRSTers out there will remember the CMUcam that we used to use, paired with an 8bit microcontroller, and serial 115kbaud radio, and the impressive things teams were able to do with that (hint: robots haven't really made order of magnitude shifts in capabilities, despite the communications stream being ~540x faster, the on-board processor being ~50x faster). The only really notable capability in my mind, is the ability to stream video from the camera to the DS. Which could easily be done by a newer microcontroller on a robust 802.11 based setup, without resorting to the sledgehammer that is the cRIO.

While I agree, I feel like it is a LOT easier for me to use doubles with the kids and not have to do hacky-ish integer decimal place preservation stuff like I did back in the day.

At this point the students should be learning how to program and solve problems given to them, not wrestle with limitations of the hardware or learning embedded software engineer levels of optimization. I feel like making the robot work with the entire rest of the team putting everything on your shoulders "working within constraints" enough

This is all just my opinion, but a simpler controller without sacrificing the ability to freely program is fine by me.