New R/C Chicken or the Egg

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by dragoonex

I think for all intents and purposes, one controller is enough and can easily handle all the requirements of any FIRST challenge. I think integrating I2C or SPI into the controller would be too much work with no real advantage in FIRST's context. What I would like to see is peripheral self identification. This would be a great advantage to have because then the controller could remap outputs depending on the peripheral. This is great way to teach new students the different parts of the control system, and let them play around with things without doing any programming. Not only does it help teach, but it also mitigates those "I plugged the victor into the wrong PWM output" problems.

I have to respectfully disagree. Providing easy to use, hardware supported, industry standard peripheral interfaces would be both simple and highly useful. There's tons of useful chips available with serial interfaces. Accelerometers, gyroscopes, digital compasses... Heck, you can get quadrature encoder counters with SPI interfaces. Wouldn't you like to use a ton of encoders without having to worry about interrupting on every encoder pulse?

While peripheral self identification would certainly be very useful, I think it would arguably take much more work to implement, what with needing to change and redesign all our peripherals to make it work.