NEW 2009 Control System Released

[chuckstudios]

The fact that each robot runs as its own access point is intriguing to me for a simple reason: robot hacking. Yes, security of your robot will now become an issue. When Dean Kamen and company were on Curie field to demonstrate the new control board, my friend happened to be on his laptop. What did he find in the wireless networks? An SSID of "NItro", the name of the NI demo 'bot. He logged into it (unsecured!) but didn't do anything because he didn't know that he was actually logged into the robot. In hindsight, he could have made it actually dance to Soulja Boy.

Something that upset me a bit was that they said we wouldn't be able to modify the VHDL for the FPGAs inside the new controller. That means we have no real idea of what's going on inside it, and can't unload any "special" tasks to it. Then in the same breath, they say the libraries will be hosted on a Sourceforge-alike site. That's not hypocracy, I swear >_>!

I also hope the router can be changed to whatever kind we like. A La Fonera running DD-WRT would be amazing for size and weight reasons compared to the DLink they had on the demonstration units. Oh well, I guess we'll find out more closer to kickoff... only 8 months to go.

Originally Posted by Kyle Fenton

Does anyone know if this is mac and linux compatible. I know that there is a Labview IDE for mac os x, but is there a compiler for the new control board

According to the information session, you can develop on Linux (and Mac presumably) but not load code. I think an open source loader may be necessary...