Alpha Weekend #2, 2015 Control System

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by apples000

Forgive me if this is on a website, or already posted, but I have a few questions about the new control system.

1. How are the times to deploy code, reimage, reboot, or connect?
2. What is the overall quality of the board and its software?
3. Are there any tools to monitor the CPU/RAM usage of the system? If so, what is the typical usage?
4. Have you confirmed the brownout voltage, or seen any part of the system drop out?
5. How well does CAN work? Are there still issues with floods of errors?
6. I2C/SPI/Serial timing? Does it work?
7. Encoders-how fast with 4x sampling, can it still do averaging? Does it have issues with getRate?
8. How much of the linux operating system is exposed? Have you used any linux features yet?
9. We're one of those teams that just wants a single solenoid for shifting so we don't want the fancy pneumatics bumper, but we use more than 4 relays on most robots. How much current can the DIO source? Enough for a relay? Can the super expansion port do it?

10. Most importantly, what are the plans for the cRIOs? Can we use them on a practice bot next year? When LV/windriver licenses run out, do we end up with really expensive paperweights? That would really suck. A lot.

11. How robust is communication? How often is there an issue between any parts communicating with each other?

12. How easy is it to troubleshoot these issues?

Thanks!

1. Times are great! Definitely improved over the cRio, at least for Java and c++
2. Quality seems great. They took a lot of feedback from the alpha teams in some of the small details to make sure things would be great for teams.
3. We haven't tried yet, but it's Linux and you can easily open up a terminal window, which means you should be able to do realtime monitoring.
4. We haven't seen the RoboRio drop out at all... The motors have drained down and stopped working before we got to that point with low batteries.
5. We're setting up a test for CAN right now - we've moved the system over to a new robot with 6 jags on CAN... Testing swerve drive with it
6. Haven't tried them.
7. We'll be testing that with the new drive system - 4 encoders and 2 potentiometers are present for drive feedback.
8. From what I've seen, pretty much all of it. Haven't really done anything special with it, though.
9. You can see full specs here: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-30419
10. We've given that feedback to FIRST, WPI, and NI, and they are well aware of the need to continue supporting the cRio.
11. We haven't had any communication issues at all.
12. Honestly, we haven't had much need to troubleshoot anything. We had a potentiometer break on us, but that was just as easy to figure out as with the cRio.