Nearly Officially Official: cRIO Control System To Be Reused

[dlavery]

We need to be kind of careful here (and elsewhere) not to let the hyperbole overwhelm the discusion. When extreme statements are made that are unsupported by verifiable fact or sources, or even just completely wrong, all they do is weaken an otherwise cogent argument.

Originally Posted by Bob Steele

This controller is nothing like anything we have ever used in FIRST before ... or ANY other robotics competition has ever used.

Actually, the cRIO has been used in robotics competitions before, as well as in many other applications. For example, the cRIO was used as the central processing resource by some of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams - and the Grand Challenge certainly qualifies as a robotics competition. Most notably, the Virginia Tech team used the system in "Rocky," their entry in the 2005 competition, and "Victor Tango," their entry in the 2006 competition (which won third place and $500,000).

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 ...

Like Cory, I am not sure where these numbers are coming from - either the high or low numbers. They are inconsistent with all the other values I have seen or heard reported. Can you cite a documented source?

Who knows... it may even make autonomous TOO easy to do...

Somehow, I doubt that. Making autonomous easier will just mean that FIRST will have to increase the difficulty of the autonomous tasks to maintain the "balance of complexity."

Certainly the limitations of the IFI interface had to be worked around and one could say that this is a good exercise for any student. I don't know anyone that was using the IFI controller in a real application other than perhaps in a Battlebot or other simple robot.

Again, that would not be the case. For example, NASA has used the IFI hardware in the development of several prototype applications. A careful perusal of this Gigapan image will reveal one example.

The purpose here is not to throw stones at a particular series of messages. Rather, it is to make the point that unsupported extreme statements and/or overstatement of facts can be damaging to the discussion. They weaken the arguments we are trying to make, and decrease our ability to be effective communicators.

-dave


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