The New cRIO

I am really excited about the 2009 FRC season and the changes being made by FIRST. Since I've been interested in getting a head start on next seasons programming and electrical, I am going to attempt to write a series of posts (probably not in a row) on some of the basics and particulars of the new CompactRIO (cRIO) control system from National Instruments (NI). CompactRIO is a low cost, high performance programmable automation controller and acquisition system powered by NI's Reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology.

One of the most needed upgrades to the FIRST controller hardware, is the ability to bypass the ancient serial joystick port. The new cRIO Driver Station will have USB ports for joysticks. Also, there will be no more slow downloads to the controller as the new cRIO is wireless and will connect to an 802.11 wireless network. This should also allow for robot-to-robot communication.

Now let's look at the hardware inside the cRIO. The new processor will be at least 10 times faster (the old 40Mhz 8-bit will now be 400Mhz 32-bit) which will greatly improve computations related to floating point math and allow for more accurate readings from quadrature encoders and allow for optical character recognition.

Programming will be accomplished using either C/C++ or NI's LabVIEW. The C/C++ IDE will be Eclipse using the WindRiver Workbench and possibly easyC and RobotC. WPILib will be supported and it looks like it will be open source. It should be supported using either C/C++ or LabVIEW.

I still haven't found a lot of details, but I'm going to continue digging. Check back often and if you have additional information regarding the new control system, please post a comment.