[NotInControl]

Originally Posted by Bill_B

Missed you guys at Suffield this year, but it was probably wise of you to stay home in the snow-filled afternoon. Seeing the new system will be a great thing at Groton. I just wanted to get a jump on telling the team that they have a higher goal for funding 2015 if they want an Athena for practice AND competition. We're using our 8-slot on our demo machine now, so the concept is not totally foreign. I "missed" the IFI era so to me it sounds a bit like the guys around the robotic cracker barrel talking about the "olden days."

Yea we were simply not ready to compete at Suffield, although the weather implications did make staying home a bit easier.

As for the RoboRio, at least for the first year FIRST is attempting to keep the programming interface the same, so the code you write for it should be backwards compatible and run on an 8-slot and 4-slot. Their may be some port addressing differences, but that is yet to be seen. I.e DIO pin 1 on cRIO could be pin 0 on RoboRio.

This was a very important point during alpha Testing. Many teams have multiple cRIOs, and while eventually they may need to be scrapped like most teams have done with their IFI controllers, using them during off-season testing, and demo bots, and keeping the cRIOs running for the first year of the transistion is a something FIRST is trying to accomplish.

In the long run, keeping the code backwards compatiple may be easier for Labview and C++ Teams than it might be for Java Teams.

Java teams are currently restricted to JavaME which is what we run on our current cRIO. The new system will use JavaSE which has many new programming constructs. In order for the WPIJava Library to become more efficienct and make use of the additional features of JavaSE, it needs to be re-written, and some interfaces will likely need to be changed.

I don't believe this will happen within the first year of the transistion, but I believe it will happen.

So in all, I don't think you need to get multiple controllers off the bat, your existing cRIOs should still be helpful in off-season, and pre-season testing with minimal to no code changes, if you can live with performace differences between the two processors their might be.

Hope this help,
Kevin