NEW 2009 Control System Released

[qnetjoe]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

Personally, I'd find it much more useful if some of this energy were directed into a technical wish-list. Then both FIRST and the staff working on the project could measure the current 09 project against various expectations.

I'm sure you understand that details about the project can't and shouldn't be shared until FIRST is ready to divulge them. So, unanswered questions don't necessarily mean bad things. My personal expectations for the 09 season is that you will indeed feel limited by the elements in the kit. It is, after all, intended to meet the needs of many individuals who do not have the technical knowledge that you do. I also believe that it will hold many nice surprises for you, both in 09 and especially in future years as this very flexible system is allowed to be fully utilized. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing what both the novice teams and the advanced teams are able to accomplish with it.

Once again, myself and other people working on the project will attempt to answer good questions when it is appropriate.

Greg McKaskle

Greg,

Thank you for you help and insights with this new control system. Here is my wish list:

1.) could someone please give us the name of the Project Head at both FIRST and NI. I am a member of the Colorado FIRST planning committee, president of Colorado School of Mines Robotics Club and a long time FRC mentor. We have a great relationship with our Regional NI sales office and have all the resources to do a mentor workshop on the new control system, but we need to know more about certain things (like access to the Digital Sidecar) so we are able to do such a workshop. Myself and many other are more than willing to sign a NDA. It is frustrating to say the least of the politics inside of NI and FIRST are cutting good people off at the knees. BTW I called FIRST on Monday (4/21) and they told me NI had nothing to do with the new control system, even after the announcement. go figure

2.) Encoder interfaces galore - I would love to see 8-10 encoder interfaces. It would be really nice if some of the encoder interfaces had upper and lower limit switch support. In our lab we setup 9403 channels as follows:

8 x RC-PWM outputs
8 x quadture encoder inputs (channels 0-7)
4 x upper and lower limit switches (mapped to channels 4-7)

Currently in our 2008 bot we used 6 encoders (4 channels had upper/lower limit switches), but that could of easily been 8 if we chose to use a Mecanum drive.

3.) More powerful sensors like gyros, accelerometer, ultra-sonics, laser range finders moved onto a communications bus (I2C, SPI or CAN). This will reduce pin count and if implemented correctly will allow for self diagnostics.

Now Moving on to the long term wish list:

4.) Make a Radio modem cRIO module. - if implemented correctly inside of VxWorks it could be used to provide the supervisory control that FIRST needs while still granting us access full access to the FPGA

5.) Migrate to using a cRIO module for motor control (NI 9505?)

6.) let us use the NI 1742 - I love this thing!

7.) Larger cRIO Chassis maybe 12/16 Slot