2015 Control System Alpha Testing

[Tom Line]

I was just informed that our 2015 Alpha Test Control system should be arriving tomorrow morning.

Our team is thinking through how exactly to test the devices. At this time, we'll be receiving:

roboRIO 1
Power Distribution Panel 1
Breakers (40A) 2
Voltage Regulator Module 1
Pneumatics Control Module 1
Battery cable 1
120A breaker 1
Serial cable 1
USB Cable 1
3-wire "PWM" cables 2
Talon motor controller 2
USB WiFi Radio 1

My question, which goes out to all the teams is this: if you had a chance to get your hands on the control system, what would you want to test and how would you do it?

Some things we're going to look at initially:
1. Time to boot (OS Running)
2. Time to code-available (OS Running and code executing - tethered)
3. Time to driving (OS Running and talking to the DS wirelessly, mainly a function of the USB Wifi Radio boot time)
4. Code interoperability - running our 2013 code on the new system
5. CPU usage - we're going to do some A versus B vision tests to really stress the CPU and compare it to the 4 slot cRIO.
6. ?

Remember a couple things before you make suggestions. We are a LabVIEW team, and we're using this to train new members. So we can't fill any C/C++/Java requests at this time.

In addition, we don't have elaborate test setups. If you want PWM accuracy measurements with oscilloscopes, it probably isn't going to happen... but we'll try to accomodate requests if we can.

I'm sure FIRST will have a series of tasks that they want us to perform as well. I do know that this control system is going to be placed our on 2013 competition robot and tested on a FIRST field. We'll keep a log of events on our web page: we hope to have pictures of the components up tomorrow. I'll start a seperate thread on that when it happens.

Finally, please keep in mind that nothing we post is official. We will not be posting code or associated documentation that is released to us by FIRST. This has been a request from FIRST to prevent multiple revision levels and confusion if documents that are not ready are made public. We are more than welcome, however, to post our own code, pictures, and anything we learn about the unit.

We will be demoing the controller at a later date and throughout the 2014 competition season.