Hey, during our local OCCRA robotics season (which switched to the new controllers) I'm planning on spending a deal of my programming efforts writing platforms and tools for FIRST. I intend on having a production version available by FIRST kickoff....
The project is
Adambots-Live just freshly approved, still in setup phase...
Anyway, the project will consist of Makefiles, WINE wrappers for MCC, a LiveCD with programming tools / loaders, and also an array of example code and algorithms.
Scripts:
Cygwin and native *nix (WINE) makefiles
Wine wrapper launchers for mcc18 and cpp18 (takes care of essential symlinking)
Shell-script for wget'ing a trial compiler, copying over an already-installed mcc, or installing mcc from the CD under Linux (both permanent and Knoppix live-install)
.deb packages for everything (perhaps alien'ed to RPM and tgz)
LiveCD distros:
Will include all the mentioned scripts.
Knoppix and DamnSmallLinux based -- a big CD and a little CD.
Will include the mcc18 - aquiring script. AFAIK mcc's license restricts me from packaging it onto the LiveCD -- if this is untrue, please let me know.
Linux IFI Loader
SDCC, gputils, and other open-source mcc alternatives (experimental -- not ready for production use. For pic hackers only!)
Algorithms Planned are:
PI(D?) closed-loop velocity control drive
PID sensorless DC motor velocity control
RTOS (real-time operating system) for PIC18, port of IFI libraries to run under the RTOS.
The hardest part will be the RTOS port . I intend on making it with freertos.org's system, since it's open-source and all...
Obviously, this is a fairly large project. If you have any suggestions or are willing to help out, please let me know.
Thanks