Thread: Purchasing the 2009 controller
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Unread 22-04-2008, 19:02
yoyodyne yoyodyne is offline
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AKA: Greg Smith
FRC #0116 (Epsilon Delta)
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Re: Purchasing the 2009 controller
Danny,

Thanks for the information. What I was thinking about but didn't ask correctly is if the capabilities that are lacking in LabView for NXT might make the environment significantly different than it will be with the cRIO. It probably doesn't matter unless there is a better alternative right now for getting some practical LabView experience this spring/summer. We have been a C development based team mainly because it would have been a financial strain to buy EasyC seats for all our programmers. Also, with the excellent code that Kevin Watson wrote we really didn't need WPILib and without the WPILib source it was not possible to teach what was really going on at the hardware interface. We had some really great success stories of students building their own microcontroller projects, especially with the Atmel devices that really need no glue and no programmer other than a serial port and a few zener diodes. It was largely due to minor mods to Kevin's code that the students got the confidence to go there...

I'm thinknig that with VxWorks already abstracting the HW the low level experience is gone unless we add a co-processor (that probably cannot be justified from a need perspective).

We looked into the LabView simulation capability but it didn't look at the time as though that would work without EasyC. However we probably could have used MPLab and just made sure that we were populating the dashboard packets with what the VI was expecting. On the topic of the simulation environment was there any capability to model the mechanical system with motor power, wheel friction, CG, weight, etc? Never got to tutorial 3. That would be really useful. What we do now is measure the system response the hard way by inserting step changes in the PWM outputs and then record the wheel shaft encoder and gyro outputs and try to come up with a low order polynominal fit to model the system. Of course this year we hade a mecanum drive with no suspension that did not stay co-planer so there probaby was no hope for modeling.

Thanks,

Greg
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