Nearly Officially Official: cRIO Control System To Be Reused

[Bob Steele]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

What distresses me most about moving to the cRIO and not recieving a new system every year is the sheer amount of abuse teams often put their control systems through. Yes, I know, 4 foot drops onto concrete and all that jazz. I realized it's a hardened industrial controller meant to stand up to some pretty harsh environments. But I don't think it's actually design to withstand people intentionally trying to damage it, as so often happens with our rookies.

I'm seriously doubting that the cRIO is going to fair any better than the IFI controller did if a robot runs away at full speed with a tether cord attached to it. Nor do I think it will react well to metal shavings inside the case when the mechanical team is doing something while the cRIO isn't properly sealed. I can think of a dozen ways for the thing to get damaged, and extending its service life over several years isn't going to help. As for all the sidecars and bumpers and such.... Well I think their names were aptly chosen. So while it's a good policy to not trash things that don't need to be, things get trashed quite often in our competitions. Our robots are typically designed for ridiculousy short service lives and then horribly abused during said life. A semi-inexpensive controller that's replaceable seems to fit right in. If anyone in the thread competes in BEST, they already know the beating high school students can put on electronics reusing them year after year.

I have competed in BEST and those components are NOTHING like the cRIO.
I have seen a working cRIO dropped from a two story building and land and keep working. (as a demonstration). This controller is nothing like anything we have ever used in FIRST before ... or ANY other robotics competition has ever used. It is made to take abuse.

From what I understand if you purchased this control system on the free market you would be paying $8-10,000. NI is giving us the opportunity this coming year of purchasing a second unit for $1000 ...

Our team uses our demo robots also and never takes them apart.
I think there are many ways to skin this cat though... Those teams that have last year's (2008 controller) or previous could probably figure out a way to make it operate an old robot. We might not be able to do autonomous... but we could certainly use it to operate the robot.

Another cheap way to do this would be by using a VEX controller.
A vex controller can pretty easily control most of what any FIRST robot has done for the past 4 years..if not all...

Now, if you build a LABVIEW based robot in 2009 you will have a tougher time retrofitting it to a VEX or previous IFI controller but it might be an interesting engineering assignment for the off season too.

I think that NI and their partners are providing something here that is going to be a critical turning point in FIRST robotics. The possibilities of this controller are incredible. Who knows... it may even make autonomous TOO easy to do... AND we are teaching students to use INDUSTRY STANDARD hardware and software.

This is an incredible opportunity for FIRST teams all over.
Let's wait and see before we start crying about spilled controllers.

This is going to be a great ride this year....

Good luck to everyone...
I hope you are doing your homework!!!