Quote:
Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV
I'm actually really surprised I haven't seen anyone push for a dual radio idea before. That just makes sense.
Dashboard and anything else noncritical can all be over wifi. It also allows us to continue to be able wirelessly program the robot as well, which is a big advantage over having to tether a serial cable like the old controllers.
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All the control data for the robot could be sent over the IFI style radio, and they even make Axis Cameras with built in wi-fi.
On a separate note, the compile/download times are where I'm hoping to see some serious improvement. This year, we used our 2012 robot code (in LV) on the 2012 robot using 2013 LV libraries for testing. The time to deploy in debug mode was about 1 minute, and the time to compile and download was about 3 minutes.
The problem was when the cRIO got into its "unhappy" mode, where it would have trouble downloading code. One day when our programmer wasn't there, the cRIO got into "unhappy" mode, and the people their weren't familiar with the imaging tool. It took them over 2 hours to download one program to the robot. They tried everything, turning it on and off, copying/pasting into a new project, using a different laptop, but whenever they tried downloading, it would download very slowly. Eventually, they decided to try just letting it download for as long as it took, and it took them 27 minutes to download our code!
Compare this to Java, where FTP is used to transfer the compiled code. The compiling takes 10 seconds, the actual sending takes about 5 seconds, and the rest is just a cRIO reboot, most of which is the network stuff loading and the FPGA being set up. There's no reason why we can't see this performance with LV on the new system, maybe even better since the whole OS shouldn't need to be restarted when a new program is loaded. Linux is good a that sort of thing, you can do any os update/software/driver install without ever needing to restart the computer!
Although this bug has gone without a fix since 2009, I'm really hoping that they can fix this issue for the roboRIO.