I, too, have experiance with NI equipment. Believe me, their staff is well equipped to handle any level of technical difficulty. And with the amount of equipment that FIRST will be purchacing, a support agreement should be supplied. I trust FIRST to make sure on the support aspect of this deal.
The weight is nothing but another engineering challange. And the adaptor boards are nothing but breakout boards, a standard in manufacturing automation.
More than likely FIRST is going to use the FPGA to have the DIO mimic PWM outputs. They also talked about on-board image recognicion (sp?) and OCR capabilities. Most likely these will be on the FPGA. FIRST may also include the data transmission encryption keys on the FPGA so that they will be much harder to be spoofed, and can be changed by pit admin with just a download.
From what I've seen, the upconverter they use is high frequency and thus little noise generated.
I too am a bit concerned about the power loss and power consumption of the controller (as we haven't seen any data on that yet), but I will hold judgement on those until I see the datasheet for the unit.
Labview is as powerful as any other object orientated language. The fact that it's objects are depicted by pictographs instead of words does not change that. Labview can also import into it any API (created from C/C++/Pascal/VB/C# etc,etc,etc) ... the only issue is the base processor it is compiled for and the hardware specific calls.
More than likely it'll be a stripped down version of NI Vision and will be imbedded into the FPGA
[sarcasm]
Oh my gosh,I've been doing it wrong all this time. I've been using LabView to control motion control systems for a manufacturing enviroment for the last 5 years. How could I have been so wrong
[/sarcasm]
My assumption (yeah, I know what happends when you assume) is that we will be getting a stripped down version of this compiler, and that it will allow calls from C/C++ (but possibly not VB or Pascal)
The IFI controller was $400.
We do not yet know the price of a second cRio, so for now I cannot comment on the value (or not)
Sounds like a challange to me.
No problem about the size of your post. You have concerns (and valid ones at that ... I just disagree, but thats my opinion). CD is a place for these discussions.
NIs and
FIRSTs motivations should be questioned. As teachers/advisors/mentors we are charged with questioning things. However, in this case, I believe (my opinion) that you are reading too much into logo sizes and corporate shenanigains (although I'll be the first to say I can be wrong).
The above is JM(NS)HO