NI Week Athena Announcement and Q&A Panel

[magnets]

In my opinion, there's two ways the controller can work. We could have a simple, cheap controller based of a microcontroller (under 50MHz), just like IFI. This could only be programmed in C (or maybe LV), but it probably couldn't run Java. It wouldn't have an operating system, or an FPGA, and encoders/high speed counters would work off of interrupts. We would use a radio like IFI's and we wouldn't be sending the camera image to the driver station. Image processing would be done with a CMUcam through a serial connection, and the controller would cost <$200.

OR, we could go with what NI has given us, a system that's really advanced, really cool, and used in the real world. This system will run a rt os, like vxWorks, or NI's realtime Linux thing (that's really awesome). This controller has an FPGA, more I/O (like USB, ethernet, and CAN), but costs more. The dual core ARM9 SoC with FPGA with 256 MB ram is overkill for most teams, but i expect to see some really cool vision/kinect applications done on the robot. The problem is that this solution is significantly more difficult to implement. NI has only so much money and so many people to make this happen, so while certain distros of embedded linux can boot in <10 seconds, it's not going to happen for us.

Many people say that this trade off is not worth it, but would you really like to go back to the time when only really good teams could use PID loops, or when you had to use look up tables for trig functions, or you needed Kevin Watson's awesome code to make a great robot program? (remember things like this?)
In 05, I could not name a single team that could cap the vision tetra more than 10% of the time. If we had the same challenge again, teams could do it.

As for the compile times, most of the actual compiling/downloading aren't really that bad (except for sometimes in LV, when the no-app thing happens), it's the restarting of the controller. If you want to speed up development, use something that reads constants out of a text file stored on the robot (see the 2013 cheesy poof's code for inspirations).

Also, it's pretty spectacular how easy to use NI's current controller is, and the new one should be the same way. I don't know of any other platform with a dual core processor and an FPGA that's easy for an inexperience programmer to use. FPGA's and embedded systems that run vxWorks are usually way beyond what a kid in high school can program. We also get support from other teams and people like Greg McKaskle to help us work out our problems.