[Danny Diaz]

I would like to respond to this thread in pieces, hopefully this will be okay...

Originally Posted by michael714

Unfortunately, the only place that the same manual says to go for info is the NI LabVIEW FRC robot modeler thread in the Chief Delphi forums. At that thread, all replies are closed.

Yes, this was done on purpose. The way this forum is configured is that the main section of this forum is for announcements or notifications - otherwise, this forum becomes a jungle when it comes to teams trying to look for information or look for updates. The subforum (that we're using here) is for questions, topics, and whatever else LabVIEW or National Instruments or DAQ related that you want. Teams wanting to look for more information on a topic can come here once they've visited the "official" announcements.

The thread had several nice links, but none of the links give any indication about how to use LabVIEW as a standalone simulator.

That is half true and half not true. Have you watched the video tutorials? The first tutorial probably does not apply to teams without the USB-6009 DAQ device. However, the second tutorial gives you a very nice walk-through of the FRC simulator toolkit and shows you how to use it.

What the tutorial doesn't really go through in detail is how the toolkit can be configured -

1. [optimal]FRC Toolkit Using the Dashboard and connected to a USB-6009 DAQ device.
2. FRC Toolkit Using the Dashboard alone.
3. FRC Toolkit Using the USB-6009 DAQ device Alone
4. FRC Toolkit by itself

I will go ahead and just tell you that option 4 above makes very little sense whatsoever. The LabVIEW FRC Toolkit is designed to be a simulator of a ROBOT that is being powered/manipulated by the IFI Robot Controller. By modeling your robot the simulation knows how your robot is configured. By watching the Dashboard the simulation can see what your Robot Controller code is trying to make the robot do. The USB-6009 can be used to feed sensor signals into the robot controller to simulate what external sensors would be telling the controller had the robot been doing what the controller told it to do (requires additional modeling).

The tutorials tell you how to use the USB-DAQ in the first tutorial. The second tutorial tells you how to use the LabVIEW FRC simulator toolkit with the Dashboard. We're working on additional examples to show you how to integrate the USB-6009 to feed signals to the robot controller.

The tutorials have track A, B, and C and track B is supposed to be for simulation. However, it indicates that NI-DAQ needs to be installed and that does not come with the trial software that can be downloaded from NI (the one that is linked to from the LabVIEW thread here at Chief Delphi).

NI-DAQ is for the USB-6009 DAQ device; if you do not have the DAQ device, you do not need NI-DAQ.

The LabVIEW thread does say to download and install NI-VISA, but it doesn't say how that helps or what to do with it.

Actually, it does - NI-VISA provides LabVIEW with the ability to access serial ports (so that LabVIEW can access the Dashboard). There should be no reason for you to use NI-VISA directly, unless you're so inclined, because all of the toolkit software provides interface VI's to the dashboard information already.

If you install and run LabVIEW, there is no indication on how to pull up the FRC simulation kit. If you use browse, you have to dig around quite a bit in order to find the stuff from the Zip file.

That is correct - LabVIEW does NOT tell you how to pull up the FRC simulation toolkit. The toolkit is an add-on; a user add-on for that matter. As far as LabVIEW is concerned it doesn't even exist - at least not until you install it. Installation instructions are provided in the main thread.

Once you find it, the installation test with no dashboard does load- thank God. However, the Simulation Envirnonment - no dashboard won't load because it can't find a missing DLL.

Did you install it correctly? Perhaps providing me with the name of the missing DLL might shed some light on why you are unable to load the VI.

Also, I'm still trying to figure out how LabVIEW is supposed to simulate the cmucam2.

It doesn't. This first release does not include any modules to allow you to simulate using the CMUCam2. We're sorry for the inconvenience, but we only had a limited amount of time and resources and this was one of the items we could not provide on this first release.

We do have LabVIEW modules (released last year) to help you familiarize yourself with the camera, and if you're using EasyC you can use the LabVIEW module to create a definition file to configure your camera in your code, but we do not have anything to help you simulate using the camera.

I'm not trying to rant here, I'm just looking for help and want you to know that it's not for lack of effort on my part.

I want you to know I appreciate your frank comments - If there's anything that needs to be explained better or if you would like to recommend examples on how to do something or if something just isn't right then I would love to know!

Thanks!
-Danny