Legality of External Co-processor

[Jeff 801]

Some food for thought... if you can have a netbook on your robot how would you make sure it was powered up before the start of the match because they do no allow you have have it powered up before they tell you to (or at least that was how it was for the 2009 season) and with that they gave maybe 30 seconds from the time of power up to the match start.

[purduephotog]

Originally Posted by Jeff 801

Some food for thought... if you can have a netbook on your robot how would you make sure it was powered up before the start of the match because they do no allow you have have it powered up before they tell you to (or at least that was how it was for the 2009 season) and with that they gave maybe 30 seconds from the time of power up to the match start.

Maybe 30 seconds? I think you're being too optimistic

Even if you were allowed to let the netbook 'sleep' you're still talking about 10 seconds to 'wake' from s3 mode. If you're talking boot you'd better consider modding the book to use one of the intel solid state drives (I just saw one for under 300$).

To be honest it seems like overkill. There is tons of prebuilt stuff for Java and the cRio, spec wise, can handle quite a few solid imagery operations (with the exception of J2K).

I'm wishing I had access to one right now (cRio and java) to experiment.

Are you trying to do image processing with stereo? If thats the case you could simply use a few USB cameras and have them request raw data- cheaper than the 'net camera and significantly faster (lower res). The Microsoft VX-3000 are cheap at 20$ a piece.

[galewind]

and you're not allowed to have an additional power supply on your robot, so you'd need to have a laptop that will work without a battery attached and only a power adapter (that you would have to tie into the 12v battery lead).

[Jeff Pahl]

Originally Posted by purduephotog

Even if you were allowed to let the netbook 'sleep' you're still talking about 10 seconds to 'wake' from s3 mode. If you're talking boot you'd better consider modding the book to use one of the intel solid state drives (I just saw one for under 300$).

You would have to mod it anyway, unless it already had solid state storage. A hard disk contains a motor, and is illegal. Same goes for any fans in the unit. And once you add the $300 drive to a netbook that costs any more than $100, you are going to have a very hard time convincing me that it complies with Section 8.3.3(H) of the rules (single configuration combined assembly < $400).

The only way for it to communicate with the cRIO would be through one of the digital I/O modules.

1771 used a PC motherboard last year (2008) modified for solid state storage, kit fans, etc, to do stereo vision processing. But it used serial communications to the old RC system, which was not an option this year.