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Unread 01-02-2013, 12:31
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Re: Best way to measure period between pulses? Counters and FPGA

Quote:
Originally Posted by jhersh View Post
I think Java is missing SPI maybe?

In general we try to make everything the same.



The FPGA code is there. It does not need to be edited.

The layer that most people write their code is only in the "User Code" layer. The layer below that is the "WPILib" layer. That is the layer that I mean that you need to edit if you want this functionality in that language. You may even be able to call into the FPGA interface layer directly from your user code if you call it at a time that it won't be overwritten by WPILib.
Thanks for your clarification, jhersh. I understand what you mean now. The students do edit WPILIB also. However, this year the netbeans plugin makes this more difficult. The wpilib netbeans project directory and source code were placed in .zip files. I have not understood why this was done. I think we need to make the code more quickly accessible, and this repackaging does the opposite.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Ross View Post
I've been filing bugs in the WPILIB Java tracker when I find something that is implemented in LabVIEW but not in Java. See http://firstforge.wpi.edu/sf/tracker...ilib_java_bugs

The things I've found are SPI, DMA, and CAN periodic status. Someone else filed a bug about digital input interrupts only being partially implemented. For SPI, I attached an implementation that works for me in the tracker.
Joe, thanks for this input. I had actually stopped looking at this website since it seemed like the development work slowed down there and WPI had since created other websites. I do know that java wpilib has changed some since last year, but the underlying squawk java virtual machine is still timestamped December 2011 when the cRIO boots. There are other features missing as well, such as UDP networking support. This is actually highly misleading in the wpilib javadoc, as the documentation implies that the functionality exists. However, the code executes with a runtime exception. Frustrates the students to be this misleading. Some of the javadoc in general leaves a lot to be desired also.

I'll happily work with the key java developers on the above.