… so I had to order one.
I hear the pre orders have already started to ship out.
Looks like there are another 299 left in stock.
With roboRIOs now shipping out, are non-beta teams going to have access to the programs needed to run robot code in Java, C++, ect on the roboRIO?
Maybe I’ve just been out of the loop (:o) but I couldnt find it, where is all this located? I hope its not just pre-loaded on the roboRIO.
Everything I have heard says they won’t be releasing code until kickoff. I’ve also heard you may be able to flash the myRIO image on to them but you won’t have WPILib or any of the other FRC items, haven’t tried it myself but I might if I find time this weekend (our roboRIO comes in tomorrow).
It comes with a slightly adapted version of the myRIO os preinstalled. I don’t know about being able to reflash it though, you would need to find the os online.
I’d think we’d want to stick with the preinstalled modified MyRIO OS rather than flash it with an unknown onto the roboRIO configuration. What’s there is more likely to work and let us play with it a little.
You won’t be able to write a myRIO image to the device, but there might be enough roboRIO support in last year’s LabVIEW (LabVIEW 2013) to get just the operating system installed. I’ll try to look into this today and report back whether it’s safe or not.
I loaded up a machine with LabVIEW 2013 on it and was able to find the roboRIO in NI MAX. You can use NI MAX to install LabVIEW RT 2013 to the target, which also installs the Linux OS. From there you can enable the sshd in MAX as well and you should have access to log into the roboRIO and play with the OS. Naturally this is the OS from over a year ago, not the newer version that will be included in the FRC images. There are a number of differences, but there are more similarities, so you can gain some familiarity with the layout of the file system. This is only if you want to tinker with the system before kick-off. You won’t have FPGA support, so you can’t talk to any I/O. When you get the image on kick-off day, you will be formatting the root FS, so don’t expect to keep any changes you may make to this older version of the OS.
Bottom line, if you really want to play with Linux on the target, do this. If you expect to “use” the device to “do something”, this won’t help you.
It comes with the safe mode OS installed, but that only runs in a RAM disk, so any changes you may make to the system are lost on reboot. Naturally this makes it a good sandbox for tinkering, since a reboot gets you back to pristine.
How are you rebooting the RoboRIO? The RoboRIO uses a journaling file system and the settings are only saved if you perform a soft restart (e.g. log into RIO from the webpage and click restart). If you do a power cycle without this, the settings are not saved.
I’m referring to the case where there is no OS installed at all (such as how they will arrive from the factory). There will be no OS running out of the UBIFS… instead it will boot into safe-mode which runs out of a RAM disk. Any changes you make to the running system will be lost on reboot. It is true that you can save files to the UBIFS while in safe mode (this is part of what makes it useful… access to the rootfs to attempt to fix them, or to recover data files before format). Any files written there will be persisted after a clean shutdown.
Now that the FRC 2015 base software is available and can be run in eval mode until kick-off, this situation improves. You can now play around with the version of the OS for the roboRIO that will be used for competition in 2015. Same instructions above apply, but the LabVIEW version is 2014.
Good news. We’ve been limited to physical testing so far.
HAWHAWHAWHAWHAW!
My wife found a good place for the roboRIO.
Well milk warmer is better than pizza oven.
But then again, it’s a milk warmer when it’s not even plugged in ?!?
But does it blend?
Yes. Yes it will. However this will void your warranty.
I can confirm that these instructions work. I can also confirm that the roboRIO is still a useless brick after following these instructions, even with access to the WPILib 2015 source code.