Today started out with a new clue from the FRC Director. Follow this link if you're interested in reading. I'll probably post something about the clue after I've had a little time to think about it.
Today I spent time digging into the new hardware and programming tools for this season. Apparently we requested to get an early shipment of the controller and it arrived late last week. This past Tuesday we opened the box and played with all the neat gadgets that it delivered.
Today we actually started making progress on hooking up the cRIO and the Driver Station. The cRIO (Compact Reconfigurable I/O) is the brain of our robot this year. It packs a 400 MHz Power PC processor with an embedded FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip for managing I/O. Comparing this power to a standard computer really isn't fair; so don't think this sounds kinda wimpy, because it isn't. It's extremely more powerful than the microcontrollers we used last year and it will allow us to accomplish some very complicated and time-intensive tasks.
Tonight our programming and electrical team consisted of 3 students and 2 mentors. We all primarily focused on electrical tasks, since there really isn't a lot to program until we get the hardware running. We updated the firmware in the Driver Station and began hooking up the wireless networking that will allow the Driver Station to communicate with the robot and also with a laptop computer. We were very close to starting some initial networking tests when we had to pack it up for the night. For school related reasons we had to be out by 6pm.
Next Tuesday we will be digging back into it, and hopefully I'll have more to write about.
If you are a student or mentor interested in programming, electrical or any aspect of FIRST, and think I might be able to answer a question you might have, please leave me a comment. I'll do whatever I can to find you an answer.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment