Are any of you using / looking at the DFRobot Unihiker? It seems very powerful, has a lot of IO in connections of the board (JST PH 2.0mm pitch and a micro:bit connector)
It seems a lot easier than trying to do an SBC, display, etc. in individual components.
It looks cool, but without network or CAN I don’t see an easy way to communicate with the roboRIO.
What are you trying to do with it? Most teams running a co-processor are doing headless units for vision or other off rio processing. There are two co-processors that are very popular in FRC the Raspberry Pi & the Orange Pi because they are popular there is more support for their processors. If you want a display on a co-processor, I would highly recommend something like a 4D systems display on a raspberry pi. That gives you the network based connection co-processors like along with some sort of on-board display.
Maybe for an operator keypad?
I look forwards to the day my operator keypad runs Debian too
It was a two step process.
A general question if people were using them, how did they like them, etc. Lots of these new SBC get out there (there are 100’s of them with a plethora of chip sets / designs. A number of people are locked into the Raspberry Pi universe and don’t look at other devices. I’m messing around with a combo N100 (Windows and Linux) that has a onboard RPi2040 chip (GPIO using Micropython).
It’s a solution to a few problems, are there other things it can be used for. I’m kind of a fan of “complete unitization”. This is a board with a screen and a SBC as a single unit. It’s not a Pi with the screen as a hat where I need to worry about outside forces moving things around.
Using all the flavor of Pi boards from the very first Pi B, the rats nest of wires makes me twitchy. It’s fine on my build desk, not so much out in the wild. Any more I will use a Grove Base Hat or similar to break out the cables. (I’m a fan of “under hats”, I’ll put long pin GPIO connectors on the Pi, so I can put hat’s under the Pi. So for a non FRC robot, the stack would be {motor hat} {motor hat} {Pi SBC}{grove connector hat}
The Unihiker comes prebuilt with connectors on it. It also has the micro:Bit board edge to allow more pins to get pulled off of the SBC.
On an FRC bot I would think about it as a little touch console for a last min look and setup of what internal values. During build season being at the robot and being able to look right there is helpful.
Of course anything that you could do with a RPi based board.
I know lots of teams look at things in the off season, and was interested if this popped up on someone’s radar.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but this seems like it would be a much worse solution than just having a dashboard on your driver station given that the robot would need to be stationary to see those
Yes, I’ve spent more time than I’d like think about looking at values on a “stationary” robot up on a test stand. Sometimes being there is more helpful than being at the operator station.
If you will be interacting with it physically while it’s inside the robot just make sure to disable the robot before you put your hands anywhere near it