Adams Coprocessor Solution

[ScottWalls]

Hello, teams! I am the programming captain of team 245, the Adambots. My team and I have been working for a very long time in doing a few ideas for robot programming that are a bit out there. We made a makefile and a makefile generator (configure.py) for WINE so that teams that were interested in using Linux could flash code onto the FRC.

Last year, we began development on a coprocessor project. It was inspired by work done in kinematics the previous year that simply didn't turn out due to the tedium of using trig functions in C. (Yes, we know, lookup tables, thank you). A coprocessor is another computer that does the processing instead of the Microchip. This is a great way to get around many limitations of the Microchip, as almost any coprocessor has more processing power than the Microchip (on our Gumstix coprocessor last year, we ran 5 independent PID loops without any slowdown or overhead!).

Having tested our code last year, we have decided that it is finally time to release it to the public. Now anyone can try their own coprocessor on for size.

The coprocessor is very easy to test. Simply hook any Linux machine to your FRC Controller through the Serial Port (on the coprocessor side) and the Program Port (on the FRC Side). Then, you can flash the FRC with our prewritten code to turn it essentially into a hub and run our python script on your coprocessor. The robot will then be running off of your machine!

Skippable: The Short Details-
Our coprocessor solution turns the Microchip 18F8722 into a dummy. All it does is sends and recieves signals such as PWMs and radio data to the coprocessor. The coprocessor then does all important processing on this information and spits the output back to the 18F8722. The code on the FRC is a stripped-down version of the default code that communicates through the program port with Kevin Watson's serial code. The code on the coprocessor was written from scratch and uses python libraries, due to the ease of programming, and just because we like python. For reference: With some work, the coprocessor infrastructure that we created could interface with many languages. That is, you could be programming in whatever language you want, although we haven't written that code for you.

To take a look at what we're all about, you can see our website athttp://adambots.gotdns.com/cgi-bin/v...in/CoProcessor
Also, if you just can't wait, you can download documented code at the bazaar branch http://adambots.gotdns.com/bzr/kickoff-polish/
(Note, to branch you need bzr, a version control system downloadable at http://bazaar-vcs.org/