Quote:
Originally Posted by Tristan Lall
As it seems to be open season on speculation, let me add what my secret agents are telling me: National Instruments (of LabView fame) has a platform called CompactRIO, which is used for industrial controls. It's modular, durable, and quite expensive. Controller units consist of a smart backplane and a stack of interchangeable modules.
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It would be very interesting indeed to see these systems embedded into a FIRST robot. I attended NI week (a big ol NI party/conference) to man a booth for our team, demoing some of our robots (we are sponsored by NI). anyways back to the story... they had many really cool displays and booths set up with LabView and NI hardware controlling some very cool robotic devices, such as remote control cars (with a wiimote no less), an visionary (exuse the pun) assembly line and a neat balancing act. they also had a tetris game that played itself, really cool vision systems, and if you did not know already, the backbone of the NXT coding system is labview.
if FIRST were indeed to pick a NI system, im sure it would be fully capable of handling whatever FIRST could dish out, and more. also, being able to be coded in both C and lab view, it would be easy for programmers of all types to quickly become accustomed to the new system.