Multithreaded programs

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by biojae

planing to use the sparkfun atomic 6dof imu on the robot next year to help with navigating the field for the touchscreen.
it communicates over serial, and we werent allowed to use the serial port this year, so i am basing my decisions on that

If I may offer a suggestion:

I think you will find writing a bit-banged serial port driver to run on the cRIO to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Serial port timings are very tight - you'd need extensive use of interrupts to make it work, and even then it might not since the digital I/O pins on the sidecar are not directly tied to processor I/O.

Instead, my suggestion is that you modify the 6DOF source code to speak the I2C protocol and wire up the 6DOF to the I2C bus that is already available on the sidecar. This is a non-trivial task as well, but I'm much more confident that you'll be able to make that work. I think the only thing you'd need from a hardware standpoint is some circuitry to limit the 5v I2C lines coming from the sidecar to the 3.3v that the 6DOF uses (SparkFun has some tutorials on that). At any rate, you'd need that for the serial port to work as well.