Quote:
Originally Posted by apalrd
I know it's capable of booting fast, but the current cRio platform shows they did very little to optimize the process. The dual-FPGA-image makes it seem like that, at least.
LV compile/download is very different:
-LV does the compiling. There was a bug in LV 2012 (used for FRC 2013) which caused the compile times to be horribly slow. I'm very aware that this is not an FRC-specific bug, but the fact that it made it through FRC beta and LabVIEW general testing shows they have no metrics or tests for times, and don't regression test for time increases, further showing that they don't have timing requirements.
-LV also does the downloading, but requries that software on the target be fully initialized or the target will crash and reboot. I am not entirely sure why this is, but it's really annoying.
-There are some cases where LV requires the 'no-app' switch, this has gone down recently but it was really really bad for me in 2012 and 2011. I also managed to get the cRio in an indeterminate state while downloading code at a competition in 2012, and had to re-image the controller in the pit because of it (it should never be possible to lock it up so that you can't just download again and fix it)
My understanding is that both Ethernet and USB are supported on roboRio for downloading code. So it's reasonable that FTP could be used still.
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Actually by defaults if you look at the white paper on the RT Linux it says that by default it uses WebDAV instead of FTP, which should be faster.
Also I think if NI cannot get LabVIEW deployment sped up, they should teach the teams how to manually deploy the executable. We did this in both 2012 and 2013 and never had a problem, and it always took less then 5 seconds to download new code to the robot. I do not know why labview does not do this by default like the other 2 languages, but it should. Compiling was another story, but that should be fixed.
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RobotDotNet, a .NET port of the WPILib.