VMX-pi may be powered by unregulated 12VDC from the Power Distribution Panel (PDP) and communicate with the RoboRIO via several methods:

• Ethernet
• USB
• CAN

Power

As shown in the above picture, the VMX Battery Adapter Cable can connect directly to one of the outputs on the FRC Power Distribution Panel (PDP); the VMX-pi onboard voltage regulator converts the unregulated voltage internally to 5V and 3.3V – and can draw up to a maximum of 3 Amps.

Ethernet

When connected to a Raspberry PI, the VMX-pi can communicate with the RoboRIO via Ethernet, providing several key features:

• Notification of Video Processing Detection Events
• Streaming of video from one or more Raspberry Pi-connected cameras (via Mjpeg-streamer), and
• Updating the RoboRIO system clock with the battery-backed Real-time Clock via the Network Time Protocol (NTP)

USB

When connected to the RoboRIO via USB, the VMX-pi navX-technology (which is compatible with navX-MXP and navX-Micro sensors) can send real-time orientation data that is accessible via navX-FRC libraries on the RoboRIO for many features.

CAN

When connected to the same CAN 2.0b bus as the RoboRIO, VMX-pi can be used to monitor the CAN bus traffic between all devices on the CAN bus.  When combined with real-time logging, this can enable system-level logging of events in CAN-enabled robots.