I want to know exactly what is running on the roboRIO. I know it is Linux with real time extensions, however, I would like to know exactly what what distro of linux, and what extensions. Also, is there a way to get the source code to this, as it would benefit a small side project my team is doing, where we are trying to use a Rasberry Pi 2 B as the CPU for our robot. Thanks.
It runs a custom distro called âNI Linux Real-Timeâ, which uses the PREEMPT_RT (aka -rt) real time patch set. Relevant links:
https://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/ni-linux-real-time
In particular, I would read their FAQ: NI Linux Real-Time FAQ - NI Community
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Youâll find anything open source that you need here: https://github.com/ni
If youâre thinking of using the Pi for competition - remember that anything that controls motors must come from the RoboRio only. Of course, off board processing is allowed (or at least it was last year - interesting to note that this year in FTC offboard processing is illegal - I just went through the FTC inspector training - probably has something to do with the new Android-based control system), but it canât be wired to the CAN bus, PWM cables, or anything else that could be seen to control a motor.
I am aware, this is strictly for off-season testing.
âuname -aâ at the shell will tell you the kernel version.
There are a number of similar projects underway, have you looked at (or are you advancing) any of them?
For example team 1425 seems to have made some progress, though I havenât yet looked at it personally:
https://code.google.com/p/fourteentwentyfive/wiki/porting
I would be very interested in hearing about your progress, as my team is hoping to build up competency on Raspberry Pis for various things as well.
Much more important then matching the exact OS version is implementing the functions that the roboRIO FPGA does.
It looks like that was for the cRIO.