Texas Instruments acquires Luminary Micro

[dlavery]

It will be interesting to see if the T.I. acquisition has any significant impacts on the Luminary Micro role in FIRST. Texas Instruments was responsible for the founding and creation of the BEST Robotics competition program. They did so after seeing the FIRST program, and deciding that they did not want to follow the FIRST model (although they do cite Woodie Flowers robot competition class at M.I.T. as one of their inspirations). T.I. is still a big supporter of BEST, and it would be reasonable to think that they might consider having Luminary Micro's support expand to include BEST as well. But will they be able to do both?

-dave



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[Jared Russell]

Very interesting.

[EricVanWyk]

Originally Posted by dlavery

It will be interesting to see if the T.I. acquisition has any significant impacts on the Luminary Micro role in FIRST. Texas Instruments was responsible for the founding and creation of the BEST Robotics competition program. They did so after seeing the FIRST program, and deciding that they did not want to follow the FIRST model (although they do cite Woodie Flowers robot competition class a M.I.T. as one of their inspirations). T.I. is still a big supporter of BEST, and it would be reasonable to think that they might consider having Luminary Micro's support expand to include BEST as well. But will they be able to do both?

-dave



.

My bet/hope is that their great attitude infects the rest of TI. The entire Luminary Team really "got it", and it is hard to keep that type of enthusiasm down.

This news did take me a few hours to process.

[crake]

Originally Posted by dlavery

T.I. is still a big supporter of BEST, and it would be reasonable to think that they might consider having Luminary Micro's support expand to include BEST as well. But will they be able to do both?

TI is also a partner and contributor to the NI Control System donation.

+Chris

[lynca]

Originally Posted by dlavery

It will be interesting to see if the T.I. acquisition has any significant impacts on the Luminary Micro role in FIRST. Texas Instruments was responsible for the founding and creation of the BEST Robotics competition program. They did so after seeing the FIRST program, and deciding that they did not want to follow the FIRST model (although they do cite Woodie Flowers robot competition class at M.I.T. as one of their inspirations). T.I. is still a big supporter of BEST, and it would be reasonable to think that they might consider having Luminary Micro's support expand to include BEST as well. But will they be able to do both?

-dave



.

Texas Instruments is definitely the biggest supporter of BEST Robotics. Texas Instruments in Houston has been one of our mentor support organizations for the DiscoBots (#2587). We have had many meetings with T.I. to expand their involvement with FIRST. Houston has two teams and possibly more that work with Texas Instruments. (#434 and #2587)

T.I. operates mainly from Dallas and Houston, will Luminary Micro stay in Austin ?

[s1900ahon]

I'll keep this brief. Perhaps Scott Emley will provide more detail soon.

- The Luminary Micro team remains in Austin.

- Texas Instruments supports Jaguar and the involvement in FIRST.

[Andrew Schuetze]

An additional interest is to see if Luminary Micro will have an effect on the BEST program. BEST just developed their own programmable robot controller which was implemented system wide in the fall of 2008 and was piloted in San Antonio, Texas in the fall of 2007. I believe that it uses the MSP430... which is a TI product. No autonomous yet in BEST,.. programming options limited to the free/open source development environment and no real sensors other than limit switches. Also still limited to a 4 channel RC for the OI.

Cool factor of BEST is to see the McGiver bots made from all wood and plastic

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schuetze

An additional interest is to see if Luminary Micro will have an effect on the BEST program. BEST just developed their own programmable robot controller which was implemented system wide in the fall of 2008 and was piloted in San Antonio, Texas in the fall of 2007. I believe that it uses the MSP430... which is a TI product. No autonomous yet in BEST,.. programming options limited to the free/open source development environment and no real sensors other than limit switches. Also still limited to a 4 channel RC for the OI.

Cool factor of BEST is to see the McGiver bots made from all wood and plastic

Wasn't BEST running the competition that ran off of Game Boy Advances?

[AustinSchuh]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

Wasn't BEST running the competition that ran off of Game Boy Advances?

I think you mean Botball, which ran of the Charmed Labs Xport Botball Controller. The XBC which used a FPGA plugged into the gameboy game slot. The gameboy provided the CPU power and screen, while the FPGA did fast blob tracking and dealt with all the hardware. Botball moved onto a modified version of the chumby running Linux this year. Hopefully I'm remembering my facts right, but I distinctly remember the reason they moved on to the chumby is because they pretty much ran the used gameboy market out of gameboys...