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I can tell you with 100% certainty that we could do the exact same thing on the old controller that we do on the c-rio. The only nice feature which we utilized differently than the old system was USB game pads, although that was possible with chicklets.
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This is true, but a lot of tasks were harder on the old controller. If you wanted to do any heavy amount of floating-point math, you had to either use a coprocessor or implement a fixed-point system and use that. On the crio, you just use floats and doubles since they are natively supported. If you wanted to do debugging on the camera, it was a 5 minute download via serial cable into labview rather than a real-time feed. Although we were never able to get our WindRiver debugging working, the fact that it supports instruction-by-instruction debugging (or even real-time debugging in Labview) is pretty huge. The multithreading available on the cRio and the WPILib library supplied with it made it easy to use encoders, gyros, and accelerometers without worrying about interrupts and things like that.
However, the crio isn't all good: the weight and size penalty of the crio and associated breakout boards is pretty large compared to the old, flat IFI boards.