Sasquatch Robot Controller powered by Arduino

[Foster]

cRio in 2014, that's been announced. According to the timeline, final choice is to be announced spring of 2014 to give 30 weeks of mfg time.

So, in 2015 you will be programming on rock solid 2012 technology. We went to the moon on 4004 level chips. Lets hope we get the Mars Rover chips, built around a radiation-hardened BAE RAD750 microchip operating at up to 200 megahertz. Each computer is equipped with 2 gigabytes of flash memory, 256 megabytes of random access memory and 256 kilobytes of erasable programmable read-only memory. If nothing else we KNOW it can take video!

Therefore, focus away from Sasquatch and other ilk and towards Seals that are balancing tetras that have Heidi's photo on three sides, and remember the ones playing music are the bonus ones. So go eat dinner, it's a long season.

[techhelpbb]

The interesting part will not be who got into round 2. It will be to see if anything we proposed makes a dent in the outcome. While we wrote that proposal we specifically made the attempt to not evangelize a particular product because of the high risk of the lock-in that goes with it (that was mentioned in our proposal directly). There was no reason one couldn't take the radio module as we proposed and connect it to the Atmel based board in this topic (in fact at the core of that radio prototype is currently an Atmel AVR chip). We weren't trying to say that the Atmel is better than the PIC, is better than the 68k is better than x86. We wanted to produce whatever we could that best fit within the context of the problem and the perspective of 'voting for best' evolves outside of FIRST as people may love Arduino this week and fawn over XCore next. We can't make everyone happy all of the time...but we can make it so you can take the blue Legos out and put the red ones in.

Our proposal said right in it we would encourage vendors to specifically do exactly what I'm giving money to do right now (I am putting my money where my mouth is). To grow specific solutions where there is market interest.

I've got really no problem letting FIRST make off with the concepts from that proposal. If they have some other vendors that they are more comfortable dealing with have a ball with it. Course doing so will require those other vendors to have interest in being open and directly accessible. So there's a better than good chance business interests will intervene because that effects the technology lock-in that allows for greater profit.

I'll be curious to see what comes from showing our cards like this.

[ajlapp]

Does the name Sasquatch imply that it has large footprint?

Very funny. It does not imply that. In fact the Sasquatch is quite small, about 5.5" square and less than an inch tall.

The name has no specific meaning. We decided to go with mythical monsters as our naming scheme for this line of boards.

So anything we create inside this Arduino powered family will get a monster name.

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by ajlapp

...
So anything we create inside this Arduino powered family will get a monster name.

I can't wait to see the Jabbarwocky board!

[PhilBot]

Originally Posted by inkspell4

I actually have used labview to program the Arduino all it takes is a simple plugin. It would most likely be configured to work if someone would take the time to make it work.

Isn't the Arduino / Labview combination simply using the Arduino as a remote perhipheral to the PC...?

That is.. All the real computation/display is done on the PC, and the Arduino is a slave device communicated with via Serial Data. So all it provides is signal in/out.

So the Arduino cannot run stand-alone in this mode....

----

This was the case when I first heard of using the Arduino with LabVIEW, I was just interested to hear if it had changed.

other comment...

BTW, if you want an example of LabVIEW running on an ARM processor, how about the LEGO NXT

[Greg McKaskle]

Isn't the Arduino / Labview combo ...

Yes. The typical involvement is to use the Arduino as an I/O unit. It is possible to target it via the embedded tools, but that involves generating C code from a LV diagram and then running that through additional development tools. This is reasonable for experienced developers, but the debugging and specifics of execution can be somewhat complicated. It is also a subset of the LV language, and the execution is not necessarily the same as desktop and RT LabVIEW.

The LEGO Mindstorms NXT is indeed an ARM7, and NXT-G is a pretty faithful version of LV, but the execution is done with a virtual machine rather than generated code. This works fine for the intended user, but it is actually rather slow, even for an ARM7.

Greg McKaskle

[ajlapp]

It seems that Simulink is the most complete solution available if you're interested in graphical programming on the Arduino.

Simulink Press Release

[daniel.mcinnis]

We can get it connected to the driver station for a little while and then it disconnects. and when looking at network connections it flickers between connected for 1/4 of a second and then goes unconnected for 3 seconds, then back to connected again and continues the cycle, so we can't get it connected long enough for the sasquatch to work.

we've tried different ethernet cords, wireless or wired and multiple laptops, anyone have any ideas?

[ajlapp]

Please email me directly and we can try to debug your issue.

Anthony@team221.com

[EmileH]

It seems as though in RobotOpenDS the joysticks are always in a different configuration. In our programming, we have the first 2 joysticks set up as drive sticks on a tank drive. The 3rd item is a Logitech gamepad for the operator to control a shooter (game is 2012 rebound rumble frc). For some reason the gamepads/sticks all show up in a different way every time we start RobotopenDS. The first 2 joysticks usually initialize properly in slots 1+2 however an "unknown gamepad" usually shows up in the third slot, and after that the Logitech gamepad shows up in slot 4.

Sometimes "Unknown Gamepad" is first and the other 3 follow, and sometimes the Logitech Gamepad comes up first of the 3 and joysticks follow.

My question is - is it possible to rearrange the sticks somehow, similar to like in the 2014 FRC Driver Station. At this time we reprogram the Arduino code to the stick config every time this occurs which is a large time consumer.

Also, "Unknown Gamepad" is defined as vendor id=04f3 product=0060, which I searched to find that it is showing an Elan product. This is likely either my laptop's touchscreen or touchpad.

Is there a way to remove this or hide it from the driverstation? I have tried uninstalling the device from device manager but it still has yet to work.

Emile

[ajlapp]

It seems as though in RobotOpenDS the joysticks are always in a different configuration. In our programming, we have the first 2 joysticks set up as drive sticks on a tank drive. The 3rd item is a Logitech gamepad for the operator to control a shooter (game is 2012 rebound rumble frc). For some reason the gamepads/sticks all show up in a different way every time we start RobotopenDS. The first 2 joysticks usually initialize properly in slots 1+2 however an "unknown gamepad" usually shows up in the third slot, and after that the Logitech gamepad shows up in slot 4.

Sometimes "Unknown Gamepad" is first and the other 3 follow, and sometimes the Logitech Gamepad comes up first of the 3 and joysticks follow.

My question is - is it possible to rearrange the sticks somehow, similar to like in the 2014 FRC Driver Station. At this time we reprogram the Arduino code to the stick config every time this occurs which is a large time consumer.

Also, "Unknown Gamepad" is defined as vendor id=04f3 product=0060, which I searched to find that it is showing an Elan product. This is likely either my laptop's touchscreen or touchpad.

Is there a way to remove this or hide it from the driverstation? I have tried uninstalling the device from device manager but it still has yet to work.

Hopefully we can solve these issues...

Since this an old thread I suggest we take it offline.

Please email me your contact info and we can start a dialogue. My email is below.