Unclaassified: Information about the 2010 control system

[Nadav Zingerman]

Today Eyal Hershko, mentor of 1577 and 1657 beta test teams, held a lecture introducing new teams and students to the cRIO and LabVIEW. He also briefly demonstrated some elements of the new control system. Here are some highlights:

Hardware:

• Beta test teams have received the touch-screen version of the classmate, not the clamshell version that will be in the KOP.
• The Classmate dual boots windows and a FIRST-specific Linux-based OS that will act as the DS (as seen on the screenshot on Bill's Blog).
• The Classmate can use its own Wi-Fi capabilities or use an external router (Eyal said he has only tested it with a router so far).
• CAN and custom FPGA are not available at this time.
• The breakout board used to connect analog and digital inputs to the Classmate is manufactured by Cypress and is programmable itself in C++ (I believe I saw PSoc on the box).

Eyal demonstrated an application of the Cypress card. There is apparently a touch panel on the card. Eyal slid his finger across it, causing a red light on the board to follow his finger. We were not able to see this up close and Eyal said that was all he could show us.

Software:
Eyal also showed screen shots of the new LabVIEW FRC framework. Among them:

• "Advanced Framework" is now called "Robot Framework"; "Basic Framework" is now called "Experiment Framework".
• Begin.vi is changed, no longer is there a giant cluster, but rather VIs that receive all the Device references. The VIs have an icon of some kind of memory card, with arrow pointing in and out. I'm guessing the DevRefs are written to some global variable(s).

Speculate away!

p.s: Please take everything here with a grain of salt. Between me making a mistake, Eyal making a mistake and thing changing between the beta and the final system, many of these details may not be accurate.