[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by michael714

Thanks Danny. Your responses made the situation much more clear. There were two things that mislead me into believing that the LabVIEW software would allow us to work as a standalone simulator. One the statement in the software oveview which basically says, "you can use the LabVIEW software as a standalone simulator" and, two, the fact that FIRST sent us the LabVIEW software with no DAQ cable.

The first part is probably one of those dilbert-ish comedies; I honestly don't know who wrote that, I wasn't in the loop on that one and I designed the system (WPI grad student Matt Krolak implemented it). It was probably all just a diabolical scheme from one of those Marketing people .

The second is one that I'm not really following - why do you need a DAQ cable without a USB-DAQ device? From the rest of your explaination (esp. the part about the 6008) you probably mean the full device and all, since the cable on the DAQ is just a regular USB cable... The 6008 will work fine for the modeling toolkit; unless you're analyzing sensor feedback from a real sensor you shouldn't need the resolution and data rates of the 6009 (48kS/s on the 6009 versus 10kS/s on the 6008). And as far as that's concerned, you could even use the IFI RC itself with LabVIEW to model the sensors - one of the user bytes updates at 40Hz, which might be enough to get at least an *idea* of what the sensor is doing; the DAQ allows you to see the sensor output at a much finer resolution.

Also, thank you for pointing out where in the tutorial to look for the info about using the FRC toolkit by itself with no dashboard and no DAQ- regardless of it's utility.

Did I do that? I don't think the tutorial, IIRC, covers the "not using the Dashboard" case - the only difference being that you can control the PWM1 and PWM2 controls with slider bars in the non-Dashboard environment so you can see how your model reacts to movement and such without having the controller present. The Motor Controller VIs really just read the dashboard information through the Dashboard Provider anyway, so modifying the sliders are a real benefit when you want really specific control (or if you want to "script" the control of the robot).

I did go through the PowerPoint tutorial and the PDF tutorial, but I only started the video tutorials because they said you had to go through the PowerPoint first. And, in the PowerPoint, I couldn't figure out how to set LabVIEW up to actually go down Track B (simulated input).

The "Learning LabVIEW and DAQ in 3 Hours" course really takes more than 3 hours, and it requires you to install a bunch of stuff you don't get when you don't get a DAQ (real smart, eh?). You can download the Driver CD Bundle for LabVIEW 8.2 and install it, but I would only recommend downloading and installing it if you REALLY want to do the "LabVIEW in 3 hours" course. Otherwise that's a 1.2GB download you really don't need. I do recommend going through the course to learn LabVIEW, but fortunately we designed the toolkit using Express VI technology that requires minimal LabVIEW programming to use; you can probably learn most of what you need to know by watching the tutorials.

I still think that it would be nice to be able to set LabVIEW up as a pure simulator, if for no other reason than being able to get used to it without having to have the robot present.

You mean the controller - the simulator is designed so you don't need the robot present! However, the simulation toolkit was designed to give the programmers a test bed to work with to develop code prior to the robot being finished - so the programmers could test and "see" what the code would do to a "real" robot if it were connected to the controller.

-Danny