Off Season Control Systems

[spacepenguine]

Hi Ryan,

I don't mean to keep any detail of the project a secret, we just haven't defined most of the parameters yet. We're playing with the idea of building a FRC-like robot for the 2015 challenge during the week of Build18. For those not from CMU (incidentally like Ryan and I), this is a 1 week HW/SW hackathon during the first week of spring semester classes. This week also happens to be right in the middle of the build season.

The constrains are that we will likely only have $250-500 of budget that isn't coming out of our pockets. This budget doesn't need to include computers, joysticks/input devices, or metal/wood stock but does include the control electronics, speed controllers, sensors, motors, etc. Processor architecture is not a concern given that we can set up the cross compiler for it. I'm thinking we want something that is more powerful than an Arduino, since that can't really run an ip stack, but it definitely doesn't need to be more powerful than the cRios were. The group is junior and senior electrical and computer engineers, so we are capable of building up the control system from individual processors.

However, we don't think this would be a good use of a single week. What I'm hoping for is a system that already handles the teleop wifi connection and joystick input like the FRC drivers station does. I'm honestly not sure what the market for non-roborio controllers looks like right now.