[Qbot2640]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

I don't intend this to sound condescending, but you're doing it wrong.

If you are making lots of little changes in quick succession in order to test things, you shouldn't be building the code in between each change. You should be executing it "interactively" by runnin the Robot Main VI. The first time you do that it will take about the same amount of time as a Build/Run as Startup, but every subsequent time will be a matter of a few seconds while LabVIEW "deploys" only the changed part of the program and runs it.

Once you are satisfied with all your changes and want to deploy the code so that it persists through a power cycle, only then should you finally Build and Run as Startup.

Not condescending at all....and we'll get there, but right now we have no idea how to do what you are suggesting. Lost the programming mentor, and our programmer last year and we're starting from scratch (less than scratch, acutally - since I'm involved).

Originally Posted by Kevin Phan

If you are constantly doing small tweaks I would suggest you look into using the dashboard to tell the robot how much to do its task. The risk with using this is the probability of the value being lost. It is minimal, but the more you pack into the dashboard, the more bandwidth you're using and could lag input. Again if you want to reduce build time, you could use a better cpu, or place all the values you are changing in one vi so that labview doesn't have to rebuild every vi. I used the robot global vi to do this and it's very convenient.

I also agree with Alan about using the robot main vi to make the small changes in testing and then building and deploying after you are satisfied with the results.

Again...we're forcibly reinventing the wheel with all new people. We'll walk, then run.

Still we do have to do builds, and we do have to deploy...even when we figure out how to do it right. What are the features of a computer that make these two processes occur faster?

EDIT: Your suggestions are sinking in, and I think I may understand. If we are fine tuning autonomous, though...do we still run Robot Main...and if so, how do we start the autonomous? Will the driver station still be active? Please give me more...I'm excited about this now.