New R/C Chicken or the Egg

[Mark Pierce]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

From the few who responded, I take it that a full blown serialized system is not wanted.

I guess in today's headline news culture you can be excused for being impatient. But we all have job or school responsibilities, it is only pre-season, and some of us want to consider our answers before responding. In two days you've gotten some very good responses. I think this topic deserves some patience and might continue to generate some positive ideas.

I like the direction of the discussion - looking forward and keeping options open. I like the idea of digital control of servo controllers, remote I/O, and the opportunity to improve wire management that this presents. I've seen many teams have a disappointing match or demonstration because a PWM style or other connection came disconnected or was not fully inserted in the heat of pit repairs. I'd love to see locking connectors, but handling the I/O we've come to enjoy and squeezing decent connections on a central controller will definitely be a challenge.

How about starting with a main controller with improved capabilities and some I/O. In year one use one or two styles of I/O modules that handle relays, limit switches, or speed controls operating on a serial bus. Over the next few years introduce additional or improved modules to add to the bus. I don't think that custom boards are out of the question given the size of FRC and chip level support for serial communication standards. As already mentioned, there are a variety of standard buses that could handle this. Whether it's the automotive LIN bus, one of the industrial control networks, or something from the consumer electronics area there are lots of choices.

Lets continue this discussion and figure out if such a scheme would work or what type of system we'd like to have.

[Kingofl337]

As far as I'm concerned take the current system, upgrade the CPU to something with a little more performance, and bring out I2C / SPI and call it a day.

[Qbranch]

Originally Posted by Kingofl337

As far as I'm concerned take the current system, upgrade the CPU to something with a little more performance, and bring out I2C / SPI and call it a day.

Yep. I can go for that too. CAN/FlexRay might be nice sometime in the future, but nowhere near the present. Another cool add in would be the addition of a flash memory chip on board... anymore, dropping 8MB or more of flash memory on a board isn't all that expensive... imagine being able to log an entire match's data for analysis.

Just like how Microchip got the finest in 8bit processors for this revision of the controller, perhaps IFI can upgrade to the finest in 16bit... maybe a PIC24HJ256GP610... *drool*.....

-q

Or... maybe the dsPIC33FJ256MC710 which has 32 bit timers... and 24 bit wide instructions... and hardware DMA access... plus with the right clock into your 32 bit timers you can get into the range of being able to measure time-of-flight for light... LIDAR anyone?