NEW 2009 Control System Released

[Eldarion]

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

As an embedded software engineer I wouldn't want to comment on that until we know more about the architecture of the new system. Specifically where the "safety features" reside. There's some good ideas floating around about FPGA based counters for sensors such as encoders.

From what I understand, having attended the "training" session at Nationals and talked with the NI guys separately, the FPGA will most likely be acting like the old IFI Master processor, and therefore will not be user configurable. I cannot be absolutely sure, however, as getting detailed information out of them was like pulling teeth!

Something interesting with regards to the PowerPC processor they keep mentioning--NI appears to be using a Virtex II Pro FPGA in the CompactRIO. That FPGA actually has two hard-core 450MHz PowerPC processors connected to the FPGA fabric. I wonder if we will be allowed to use both cores, or if they are using the other core for something else (more Master functionality, perhaps).

The biggest thing that is bugging me at this point is the sheer size of the applications that are downloaded to the controller. 75Mb+ for a simple two-wheel drive control program??? That screams bloatware to me! I wonder how easy it is going to be to chew through the 128Mb of FLASH storage?

I also talked at length with the NI guys about the "Real time vision system". All of the vision algorithms actually run on the PowerPC processor, and if you do unbounded OCR or any vision processing at a higher level than basic color thresholding or simple shape detection, the system will not be real time. They were able to get the "reading" demo to work in real time because the words were surrounded by either an oval or a rectangle. I am not sure if they were using the OCR after that first processing stage or not, but they were definitely keying in on the shape. I just wanted to clear up some misunderstandings and confusing / conflicting information on that particular subsystem.

All that said, if they can work out some of the bugs, this looks like a very powerful system and it will be interesting to see what teams can do with it!