look Ma, no OI

[nic_radford]

Ok - ya, this was a really fun project to do. I would love to divulge all the details, but unfortunately, I won't be able to.

First I gotta say something about it ONLY taking 5 mins to download the accompanying movies. I realize this is the 'now' generation 'n all, but man I can remember connecting online with my 9600 modem and downloading Photoshop 2.somethingorother and it taking all night! Geeze...5 mins...

Politics:
Aside from how this is actually done, the more interesting discussion is increasing teams at nationals. Obviously there is only some much bandwidth in the 900 Mhz spectrum for the radios, a reason FIRST uses for keeping nationals to smaller numbers (I don't know the entire details on this matter, but that's the gist of what I've heard). But if we were all using WIFI to talk to all of our robots.....hmm....Could y'all imagine! All the differnent fields such as Currie or Newton having different subnets and everyone's robot which all have IP addresses. Wow, we could have a lot of robots at nationals then. Just something to chew on.

Technolotics:
So the 2004 FIRST controllers have a TTL port that you can access from userspace. With few little electronics to convert the TTL to RS232 (TTL = 0 to 5V) and standard RS232 (something like -10V and 10V, I forget at the moment and am to lazy to look it up) you get the signals in the proper levels for communication. Of course there is the driver that needs written since Innovation FIRST doesn't directly support that port. But the PIC documentation has some useful tips and help. But it's not too bad. After that is done, there is a neat little device on the market that takes Ethernet to RS232. And then there is a little handwaving on the Laptop side with vitural comm ports and such, but you can literally assign and IP address to the FIRST RC, and you have an alternative way of sending data to the RC. What is even better is the data is coming in the FAST LOOP! Previous you could only get data refreshed from the OI at the 26.2ms loop speed. So now you are only limited to how fast you can service the TTL port.
The other interesting fall out from this is you can essentially double the amount of IO on-board the robot. You could use the OI local to the robot. You can all think about that one for a minute or to. So, I hope you all enjoyed all this and would love to answer any other questions.

Nic