Second cRIO as COTS computing device?

[njg]

Would it be legal to utilize a second cRIO on the robot solely for the purpose of vision processing?

All robot control and communication would be handled by the primary cRIO. The secondary cRIO would have it's own IP address and communicate with the primary controller similar to any other COTS computing device. The primary motivation is to be able to program the robot in Java and the vision processing in LabVIEW. Last year we attempted to perform image processing in Java but found it to be lacking with respect to LabVIEW. (only a subset of the functions are built in)

If this is legal, could both of the cRIOs be powered from the same connection on the power distribution panel?

[Joe Ross]

Another way to do this is to do the vision processing on the dashboard. For a similar price as the cRIO, you can get a much faster laptop to run the driver station/dashboard. This is what we plan to do (LabVIEW dashboard doing vision processing, Java robot). Last year we did a LabVIEW dashboard doing vision processing with a LabVIEW robot.

The 8 slot cRIO doesn't meet the $400 cost limit, but the 4 slot cRIO does.

You would not be able to use the 24 volt supply on the PDB (See <R43>), so you would need to design another 24 volt power supply (or a boosted 12 volt power supply since you'd be using a 4 slot cRIO).

<R55> specifies that one cRIO (only) must be used for controlling the robot, but I don't think it precludes a second cRIO as a coprocessor in the method you describe.