Using Vex Brain as FRC Coprocessor

[Ken Leedle]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

The most annoying of which would have to be soldering it to something. Look at the PICs that are controlling your robot this year. Now imagine trying to solder it.

Not so fast. http://www.infidigm.net/articles/solder/
This is a very effective means of hand soldering 80 pin TQFP chips like the 18F8520. I have used it successfully on 3 boards so far. Check it out with a microscope before you power the board on though.

I made a IR interrupter for the ball sucker upper on our robot using a PIC18F88. It only produced a square wave, but my mentors wanted to see how to make a PCB using toner from a laser printer. It worked very well, but this could easily have been done using a COTS sensor and the RC. (I also needed to brush up on my assembly).

I agree that it would be difficult to communicate with a coprocessor because you do not have access to the RC's SPI or I^2C and you need the USART for the video camera.