[JesseK]

Mr. P,

Arduinos may be cheap and a good way to write software in the offseason, but I think you'll spend much more time in integration than you'd spend in just writing C++ code for the cRIO.

You could write a layer between the robot logic code and the arduino-specific code such that the robot logic code can be transferred to the WindRiver environment and compiled for the cRIO directly. That's (essentially) what we do on much larger platforms (I program submarines) to isolate software from hardware. However, there will need to be a substantial amount of testing on the CRIO platform before you can call the code reliable.

As for the teaching side of things, if you have 20 kids in software then perhaps you can come up with other tasks for half of them to do. Tasks like custom dashboards written in Java that deserialize custom packets from the robot. There's a whole side of robot-human interaction that can be explored if done properly. There's also a very large set of tools these programmers can write for your robot so that tuning PID's, limits of sensors, debug levels of files, etc, become much easier for the other programmers in Week 6.

Good luck!