I’ve been around FIRST since I was a kid, the 90’s, but more recently, the last 2-4 years, I haven’t been very active. I’m looking to start helping as a mentor again and need to know about some of the changes that has happened in the software side. I’m currently a software engineer so learning the packages wont be to hard. I stopped helping the season the cRio was introduced.
So my main question is what have I missed?
I looked at the new hardware and the Kinect for this year and have a bunch of questions. I thought instead of searching for hours I’d see if someone could give me a brief rundown.
cRio is a Lamborghini for the job for a Honda Civic. IMHO, it is too “powerful” for such applications as this competition. I think it is more cost effective to use a less powerful system.
The new 4 slot cRio has a 400 MHz PowerPC core processor with a Spartan-6 LX25(or spartan 3) 2M FPGA. 128 MB of Ram and 256 MB of Flash. The older cRio has half the memory and a Spartan 3 2M FPGA.
The FPGA handles most of the timing, sensor input/processing ,communication and other essential operations. The library is really easy to pick up on, just spend a few minutes reading over the API and you will get a gist of what is happening. If you really want, you can look over the source code.
The 3 choices of official languages are C++, Java, and LabView.