Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

Recently my team's computer with all of our robot's programming was stolen. Thankfully, the robot remembered all of it's programing, and can be run from a temporary computer. Is there a way to load/copy the programing from the robot on to a computer, so the program can be edited? But also not erased from the robot?

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

No. You can't do it. The code has been compiled, and can no longer be decompiled easily.



Lesson: ALWAYS keep code in multiple places. Like, your laptop, and someone else's flashdrive, or your laptop, and a mentors laptop, and your flashdrive. Keep one copy as always up to date, and work off that, but periodically back up your data to the alternate sources just in case. It won't be the latest revision, but it will at least be no more than a day or so old. (If it's the "off-season" (The season is never really over), the last event would be fine)

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

Why not just recode it? Yea, it is a good idea to have an external server to back everything up.

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

I would suggest that you use an online backup solution for your code. I am not sure which language your bot was programmed in, but our team used Java with subversion (a version control system) to store our code. This allowed use to make changes and get back to a working copy really fast is we messed something up.

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

http://code.google.com/
http://sourceforge.net/
http://www.assembla.com/catalog/tag/free
http://beanstalkapp.com/
http://unfuddle.com/
http://www.xp-dev.com/


There are tons more if you look for them

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

We used Sourceforge.net last season, but I think I'll probably setup a Google Code project this season.

As for your original question, no, there's no way to easily retrieve the code from the robot. Sorry. :(

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

Allow me to ask a related question if I may:

When uploading freshly-built code to the robot using, say, LabVIEW, is there a single large file that is being uploaded, or is it a series of several files, possibly gathered from different folders?

Is it possible to identify and archive this file(s), in a form that would permit it (them) to be uploaded at a future date without having to re-build them from the source code?

This is not an idle question. It has real practical significance.

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

In the case of LabVIEW it's a whole slew of files.
These are all located under a build folder (set in properties of your Build Specification) where they are downloaded from whenever you use Deploy or "Run as Startup"
Usually under My Documents\LabVIEW Data\your project\Builds\c\ni-rt\startup

You don't need to Build unless a change to the source has been made.
Each file is then downloaded only if the PC version is different than the current cRIO version.

For Java and C++ it's a single .out file.

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

Is there any way to upload these to the cRIO after the LabVIEW license expires?

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

If you want to preserve everything to use after your LabVIEW license expires, to be safe I'd probably just ftp the whole directory tree on the cRIO back to a PC and store that.
The advantage there is that it could be captured and stored anytime after you discovered your license was no longer valid. Most teams would have forgotten by then exactly which program had been left last on the cRIO.

It would be valid with that particular cRIO image, but without a license you probably wouldn't be able to re-image the cRIO with the corresponding FPGA code if need arose.

Re: Transfering Programing From Robot to Computer?
 

As Mark mentioned, a simple ftp command would do it. The fpga image is in there too, though without having a cRIO on me on the weekend -- hate it when that happens -- I can't be precise about where it is stored.

Greg McKaskle