FRC CPio Test

• Report rights infringement
• published: 04 Dec 2013
• views: 64

Hello. After 3781's 2013 FRC season, we wanted to keep our 2013 robot for assemblies and such. Trying to reuse as many parts that we could, the most expensive part was the CRio. Looking for an alternative, one of our team members suggested the Raspberry Pi, a cheap, $35 computer for electronics experimenting. The Pi has GPio pins that can control our Jaguar motor controllers, and the Pi has an Ethernet cable, which we can plug into our 2012 router. We decided that it was the cheapest solution, with the whole "Pi project" rounding to about $80 total (compared to the CRio: $1000). On our Pi, we used the Adafruit Pi Cobbler to separate the GPIO pins on the Pi to a breadboard. We used the model B version of the Pi, along with a 4GB SD card (our 8GB got stolen, so we worked with what we had). Software wise, we used the Linux distro Raspbian, which is one of the most popular operating systems for the Pi. To control the robot, we used Node.js running on the Pi, that started at boot up thanks to Daemons. On the control laptop, we also used JavaScript, using Socket.io to do communications. Our code for our robot is open source at: https://github.com/FranklinPierceRobotics/FRC_CPio In this video, we were testing the boot up, wireless communication with the router, and the GPIO pins. The LED on the breadboard represents the robot communication light. On the CRio, it blinks fast when disabled, and slow when it is enabled. For our CPio, it wasn't really required, but made everything look nice. The Pi was connected to the DLink router that was used in 2012 (model A version). We used our classmate, along with a Logitech F310 gamepad for testing the joysticks (F310 is the gamepad used in FTC, but we also configured ours to work with the Attack 3).