2 robot controllers legal?

[EEthan]

The RC's we get from IFI aren't great for doing a lot of math... an RC is just 2 small PIC18F8722's, one of which you program and the other just handshakes and trades data with the other and shuts it down when it gets irritated. Both of these processors and 10MIPS (million instructions per second) with no floating-point units or 16-bit (or greater) math bing done per instruction cycle. On top of that, you lose a lot of efficiency because of constant comms with the master processor, and RC-RC communication is tough to do quickly.

Depending on your amount of free time, knowledge, and general nerdiness, you might be able to get much, much faster math done on either a custom built processor board (really really hard). Or, you can do what a couple of teams are doing and buy one of those shuttle computers with a 1.6Ghz or slower processor and run a little VB app that uses the serial or parallel port to communicate with your RC. With one of those, you can get many many orders of magnitude faster, and you'll be able to do floating point ops and trig functions without getting bitten by the watchdog or using lookup tables.

You should be able to get one of those small computers for less than $250. I believe there are a few threads on this topic.