Purchasing the 2009 controller

[Mike Mahar]

I'm assuming that there must be some sort of way of scheduling things. VxWorks is a multi-task RTOS. How do you schedule anything without any interrupts? For example, this year we used the gyro which is a rate sensor. To get an angle we had to integrate it over time which requires an accurate time base. The FPGA could do this for us but we don't know what is in the FPGA and we can't change it. If the function that we need isn't there, how do we work around it? Similarly, the accelerometers can give you speed by integraing over time and then you can get distance by integrating the speed over time. In this case the speed isn't even a real input and is unlikely to be in the FPGA.

I've read up on the mpc5200 that is in the cRIO and there are 8 timers built into the processor. I suppose that those will still be available.