Using a non-FRC cRIO?

[Robostang548]

One of our sponsors uses a lot of NI hardware and brought in a cRIO-9002 to see if we could find a use for it.  I know we can't actually use it on the robot, but i figured we could attach it to a board with some jaguars and a digital sidecar as a workbench for our programmers while our actual FRC-cRIO hardware is away (shipped robot, electrical work is being done, drivers are practicing with the robot, etc) to continue experimenting with sensors and such.  Is it possible to flash this cRIO with the FRC image and have it communicate to the driver station via a wired connection and insert the two additional digital and analog modules that came with our control system kit?  How would we go about this?  Right now the status light is flashing (indicating it needs to be setup using MAX).  I think the ip has been reset to 0.0.0.0 but I cant seem to get it to connect to MAX to view how its currently configured.  I also tried connecting with a serial terminal to see if I could get any information on it but couldn't get a console out.

[Jeremy_B]

Hi,

I think it is unlikely it will work, for several reasons.

1)  The 9002 only has 32 MB of RAM, while the FRC version (which is a modified 9074) has 64 MB.  I know for a fact that the image won't fit in 32 MB.
2)  The 9002's processor is about half the speed of the 9074.

3)  The 9002 runs a different operating system than the 9074, which means it runs a different version of LabVIEW real time.  When you image a controller in Measurement & Automation (the way it is normally done in industry), it automatically loads the correct version.  However, the FRC imager just transfers a static image and cannot differentiate controllers, so even if you could load it, it probably wouldn't work.

However, you can use the modules with the 9002 (provided you have a backplane, which I assume you do).  Since you won't have an FPGA image, you'll need the LabVIEW FPGA module to program it, and you'd need to write your own code to interface with the Jaguars and sensors.  On the plus side, I imagine there are some students out there who would be interested in playing around with LabVIEW FPGA, so it might be worthwhile to set up just so they can play with that.

Is it a single blink on the status LED?  Try running it in safe mode and connect to your PC with a crossover cable, and also disable your firewall.  If you have more than one network card (including wireless cards), disable everything except the card the cRIO is connected to.

Regards,

Jeremy Billheimer
Applications Engineer
National Instruments