Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg Needel
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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Couple things that immediately come to mind:
--In circuit debugging (
). This allows programmers to very easily see what they're code is doing while it's running. While one could argue that the same thing could be accomplished with printf statements, the amount of data that is available more readily in a much more logical format (i.e. code tracing) is a vast improvement.
--Custom dashboard with increased user data size. Yes you could write your own dashboard client for the old control system; again I could argue the ease of implementation here, but I won't. To me, the big thing is increased communication between the robot and dashboard. 984*50 bytes per second as opposed to ~15*50 max (assuming you make use of unused PWM readouts, all the user bytes, etc) on the old system. With this kind of capacity you can now stream back live video. Not possible on the old system, unless you're a fan of 8x8 pixels video...
--Increased processing. New controller: 400 MHz, 760 MIPS, including a Floating Point processor; Old controller: 80MHz, 10 MIPS., no hardware FP support. I.e. we can process video now, among other things.
--Graphical programming language: Some people hate LabVIEW, but my experience is it makes programming much easier for people just learning it. Case in point: the LEGO NXT software is based off of it.
Just because teams haven't started using all of it yet, doesn't mean that it isn't an improvement. As has been noted, that's more a factor of little time to explore the capabilities of the system.
--Ryan