2004 Robot Controller

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally posted by Sachiel7
They may upgrade it so it does have a higher transfer rate, and It may not use 900MHz radios anymore (Although I'm not sure why they'd switch)

Pure speculation: I doubt they'll change the radios to be higher than 9600bps. My reasoning is that 9600 is "fast enough". The data from the OI gets to the robot in a short enough amount of time that it's not a noticeable delay to the operator. Sure, we'd all love to be able to pump back more data to the OI, but I doubt that's a big concern for IFI. Radios that run more than 9600bps are expensive. If anything, I'd guess that they'd change to radios that allowed more channels. They were getting really close to using all 40 channels at Houston last year, and that increases the risk that two different robot's signals will interfere with each other.

I doubt that they're going to use the STAMPs that are in the OI now to continue with next year's PIC based system.

I'm not sure how this rumor got started (and I've seen it mentioned before in other threads), but the OI doesn't have a BASIC Stamp in it, and to my knowledge it never has. Think about it - why would they put a stamp in the OI? Stamps are considerably more expensive than other embedded processors, are a whole lot slower, and use a rather clumsy programming language.

It also wouldn't make too much sense that the User_Routines.C Processes every 17ms if they're going to keep the transfer rate at 28ms.

Page 10 of the 2004 Programming Reference Guide actually says that Process_Data_From_Master_uP() runs at 17ms on the EDUbot only. It specifically states that it still runs at 26ms on the real RC.