Anyone interested in a Linux-based robot solution?

[AustinSchuh]

I'm going to give my best educated guess, which will be pretty close.

Before the cRIO, the IFI system had 2 CPU's in it. One CPU dealt with communications and the safety protocols. Eg: if it didn't see a packet from the driver station within a set amount of time, it would put the robot in disabled mode and disable all the motors. We weren't allowed to change the code on that CPU, and could only change code on the other CPU in the system.

On the cRIO, I'm pretty certain that the FPGA kills the motors if it doesn't see a packet from the Driver Station within enough time, or gets a disabled signal, or gets an e-stop signal. So, it's serving the same purpose as the IFI system's second CPU. It probably also implements the watchdog. This makes it so that if we totally mess up the software as users, if someone tries to kill the robot, the robot will stop.

To sum it up, you want to have some sort of safety system that won't rely on end user code (that can have bugs in it) to stop the robot when it looses comms, gets a disabled signal, or an e-stop signal.