Quote:
Originally Posted by crake
Genius of the AND: simple and supported and sophisticated and speedy.
choosing between seemingly contradictory concepts—focusing on this or that—leads to missed opportunities
|
If the current cRio system is any example, choices have to be made to retain the Simple and Supported requirement. As much as we want everything, the cRio system clearly isn't anywhere close.
The VAST majority of teams want to be able to drive their robot and actuate their mechanisms with joysticks or buttons, and possibly do something in autonomous. For those teams, the current control system has a LOT of setup and puzzle pieces to fit together and configure separately, THEN they have to write code to make it do anything. I would estimate that at least half to two thirds of all FRC teams are in this place, maybe adding a limit switch or two. These are the teams that benefit most from any control system improvements.
The next class of teams uses sensors and feedback controls in some way. These teams want to be able to connect their analog potentiometers and quadrature encoders easily, read them easily, and execute their code. The current LV environment makes no attempt to maintain any sort of timing determinism, which makes basic example control loops including calculus terms hard to deal with. These teams spend a lot of time fighting this, and most LV teams in this category will also hit 100% CPU utilization trying to run their feedback controllers at a moderate speed using the 2013 libraries. I've talked to MANY teams and programming leaders who asked for advice on code optimization, trying to get their code to run at all, let alone in a reasonable execution time with reasonable determinism.
There is also the <1% of teams who design custom circuits (other than COTS computing devices) and complain about how hard the cRio is to interface to, because they want higher-speed SPI or LIN or some other protocol which it doesn't support. These are NOT the teams we should be focusing on, because we still haven't met the needs of the 99% (or come anywhere close). In fact, we were closer in 2010 than we are now - Code compile/download times and CPU hogging 'bonus' library features have gone up significantly since the cRio was released, and in many ways the usability has gone DOWN.
Teams REALLY want a controller that just works. They want to be able to hook it up and drive their robot without doing too much electrical and software work, configuring a whole bunch of separate devices using separate tools and instructions, and writing code. Anything else is secondary to this goal.
Speaking of this, why is there no default code for this control system like IFI and Vex provide? It's a HUGE help to Vex teams to be able to just drive and test things without writing code.