teensyRIO -- LC or 3.6 on an MXP board

[teletype-guy]

Hi folks:

New on the forum. Quick bit of background: my son's 3rd year on the team but I am only really this year digging into being a mentor (30+ years as an EE). Last year's bot has been hands-off for events so to get my son going on programming/elect I just bought a roboRIO and we mounted it to an old test chassis with a simple two-motor drive setup. Used an old router as an access point for DS. After a bit of a learning curve (firmware update, load the image, the JRC, etc.) we finally got it all working and got him set up coding java -- basic auton and teleop is working, so he is off and running.

I decided to experiment with some new short-range (~1200mm) LIDAR chips from ST -- I will follow up on that with a post in the sensors forum, but I thought this control-system forum was best to mention a board that I will make available by year-end, teesnyRIO. It is an MXP board that can mount a Teensy LC or 3.6 (or some others depending on pinout), and can also host another MXP board above it, with all pins passed through. The Teesny hangs on the MXP I2C port as a slave -- code running in the roboRIO auton or teleop loops can communicate constantly with the teesnyRIO. My main purpose is to talk to a string of LIDAR modules mounted around the robot frame, so the only real circuitry on the teensyRIO is a second I2C (master) port routed out a 6P6C modular jack with switched 5V to power the lidar chain up when needed, or off when not.

The teensyRIO has a large proto area, and I suspect that we will find other things to hack onto it (perhaps other folks will as well), which may lead to new versions.

I will have a modest quantity of them available, and I will post the hardware design and open-source the firmware in the teensyRIO, as well as the communication code in the roboRIO. As I understand it, this makes the teensyRIO usable for 2017 if design files are public prior to kickoff.

The Teensy boards are Arduinos on steroids, and you can program them using the free arduino IDE, and pull in an extension to harness the full power of the Teensy, which has lots of features/flash/ram not found in a boring little arduino. The Teensy family is based on ARM Cortex chips, and while you can program them bare-metal with GCC or such, I suspect folks in FRC will find the extended arduino IDE perfect.

The teensyRIO can be used to off-load code from the roboRIO, especially good for integrating various sensors and only passing desired data to the roboRIO. All of the code for initializing/calibrating/reading sensors, especially time-critical routines, can be hosted in a controlled co-processor.

FYI, Gil Smith