Should we buy roboRIO v1 or v2?

FIRST General Forum
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This Chief Delphi post implies there are issues with the roboRIO v2, meanwhile v1 works well: RoboRIO 2.0 Reviews? - #7 by pureh2o

This blog, however, implies the roboRIO v2 is better than v1: NI Guest Blog - roboRIO 2.0

Which roboRIO should we buy?

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I’m pretty sure the v1 is no longer being sold, so the argument is moot. If you’re looking to buy a new rio the only option is the v2 afaik

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2 absolutely a 2 if you’re doing any kind of vision or state space work the Rio 1 is already on its last legs.

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4

Our team used the v1 with no vision this year and it worked fine, so imo if your not doing anything heavy like vision then the v1 would be just fine if you can find an unused one somewhere for sale. from what ive heard the v2 has issues with the SD card slot failing.

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5

We were handling 4 vision feeds for pose estimation, inverse kinematics, and dynamic automatic scoring systems, we really pushed it and had to offload multiple things to coprocessors and send data over websocket. I know that’s not standard for use but it’s better to get more head room plus who knows how long the Rio 1 will be supported.

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6

I’ve heard enough concerns/reports of the SD card on the RIO 2 self ejecting (both locally through word of mouth, and here on these forums) that we wont be using ours on a competion robot until FIRST makes us (ie, once the RIO 1 is no longer allowed to be used).

We bought a RIO 2 this year so we could have a full practice and comp robot. Would have gladly bought another RIO 1, but they arent being made/for sale anymore. We chose to keep the RIO 2 on the practice bot as the RIO 1 has a perfect track record for us when it comes to reliability.

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7

Neither the Rio 1 nor Rio 2 has enough processor speed to handle vision well natively. Both are more than capable of running the robot. Most teams handle their high speed control loops on the motor controllers and their vision and object detection on co-processors.

Claiming that ‘state space work’ is too hard for the Rio 1 is somewhat non-sensical. Many state space equations that work in our level of robotics can be reduced down to very simple math problems that the Rio is more that capable of handling.

If you are attempting path generation on the fly, or some other highly iterative processor intensive process you may want a Rio 2. But for 99% of the use cases in FRC, a Rio 1 is still just fine.

I feel safe saying it will be supported for the foreseeable future. Too many teams rely on it for FIRST and NI to let it fall by the wayside.

That all said, you cannot buy a Rio 1 new, though I’m sure many teams have used Rio 1’s they will sell.

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Can someone elaborate on the issues that teams have faced with the Rio 2?

We have a Rio from 2020 that is unused, should we use that or buy a new Rio 2. What do teams generally do? Do you reuse Rios year-after-year or use a new one for the new robot?

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Yes. We have two. Some teams have enough income that they just put last year’s robot on a shelf and buy all new stuff every year. We have neither the space nor the money for that.

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Two of my team’s RoboRIO 2s internally short (on different robots). I also saw another team at a regional with the same exact issue. One shorted during a match at worlds this year causing us to have no arm control and lose the match. In the future, my team will only be using our last remaining RoboRIO 1 in comp until the issues with the 2 are fixed.

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My team has done motion profiled on the fly trajectory/path generation on a RoboRIO 1 and never had an issue (swerve drive paths as well).

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Issues that we have had:

  • SD Card won’t eject properly
  • SD Card won’t insert properly
  • SD Card gets corrupted

In 2022, we chose to run a RoboRio 1 due to having the SD Card get corrupted a couple of days before our first comp.

In 2023, we ran a RoboRio 2 without any issues. Note this one was not from the original 2022 batch (both of those we had issues with).

We attempt to use a new RoboRio; the old ones are used for backups, software training, demo and practice bots.

2022 really didn’t work out that way, but we used a “lightly” used RoboRio – one that was only used on a software bot and didn’t face the normal shocks from defense.

We may be a bit on the cautious side as we try to not re-use electronics on comp bots.

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They didn’t handle it natively, just the act of reprocessing vision estimates nearly caused loop overruns, we had to offload A* pathfinding to another device as well, using 6 coprocessors for everything and the Rio would still have issues doing tasks like Inverse kinematics

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if you use i2c ports, avoid the rio 2, because currently because of software problems its broken and will just stop working mid match(we had this issue with a rev distance sensor, asked the guys at the rev booth at worlds about it this is approximately what they told us)

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Even the Rio 1 is having I2C lockups when devices disconnect locking up the entire code loop. In general I’d recommend avoiding I2C if possible.

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This is a hardware issue in both rios*. Please please please use something like an RPi Pico or coprocessor bus instead of risking it.

*The MXP bus doesn’t have this issue, but it’s not broken out as well and anecdotally has similar problems.

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Would not phrase it like this— I2C is a very useful protocol that’s widely supported by COTS sensors (hobbyist-grade and higher)— many of which do what FRC-specific devices can’t for cheap.

The resource cost of putting an MCU board on a robot is honestly really quite low compared with a full-on SBC coprocessor, and has some significant advantages (wrangling multiple addressable LEDs strips), and a lot of people come into FRC with existing knowledge of Arduino C.

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The Rio 2 has twice the memory of the Rio 1. This is not insignificant. If you are building relatively complex software, you may find that the Rio 1 no longer has enough RAM. This is true for us, and when we looked back at previous codebases we found we were closer to the line on Rio 1’s than we’d realized at the time.

The extra speed is also nice to have, though not enough to be hugely significant.

We haven’t had SD card issues - we only remove the SD card (carefully) when necessary to reimage, and cover the slot with electrical tape when it’s installed.

The only issue we experienced on a Rio 2 was a problem with the NavX intermittently losing power that surfaced in postseason play in 2022. We haven’t identified root cause of this. We purchased a new Rio 2 for 2023 & have not had any issues with it.

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CSA here. The MXP I2C bus has the exact same issue described here, despite the claim that the MXP port mitigates the issue.

When I say exact same, I mean in terms of symptoms when the lockup occurs. I personally do not know if there’s a difference in circumstances required to cause it between the two busses, but I can tell you I’ve personally seen the MXP I2C bus lock up a roboRIO repeatedly.

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It’s twice the memory but if you note just the Linux kernel and default background tasks take up more than 80% of the memory on the Rio 1 giving you a tiny margin whereas the Rio 2 provides roughly 6x the usable memory.

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