This April the cortex will be five years old. As we just had another round of software and firmware updates I thought it would be fun to see how many we have had over the past five years. Things have come a long way, the early releases caused some scares (anyone remember ROBOTC 2.16? ) but it is pretty mature and stable now.
(click for full-size)
I love stability. I fear as a funding mentor the 5 year part and the possibility of change for change sake.
On the ARM processor side, luckily the ARM M3 processor is still a main stay in the line of processors. As that migrates lower/older, how many more years do we have of this generation.
The M4 is what they describe as for “High-performance motor control” while the M3 is more for “Activity Tracker”. Is it the processor or memory that is the limiting constraint on the Vex Cortex. One millisecond cycles are well enough on 10 PWM based motors I guess.
Anyway good reading from ARM here…
I wasn’t in any way suggesting the cortex is near the end of it’s life, rather I was interested in the firmware update cycle. For example, we had a long period from summer 2012 to the beginning of 2014 on master firmware 3.23. The introduction of VEXnet 2.0 neccesitated a major change and it took a few small revisions to sort that out. I wonder if 4.25 will now be with us for several months.