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Unread 26-03-2009, 13:27
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Re: cRIO, has it 'upped the game'?

oh its upped the game alright. A whole new level of challenges to work through!

the rio is a great piece of hardware; insanely durable and reasonably powerful for a realtime controller. it could be said, however, that its not inexpensive (get it? ni? har har... har... ehem). When one of these controllers breaks its a huge expense to get a new one, and its virtually impossible for a hobby developer to even lay a finger on. I guess the price point really isnt arguable, but it is pretty high.

with the power too comes loads of fluff. Im sure teams who are downloading and programming code in labview note a significantly longer code-change-to-execution time than we could have possibly even imagined in previous years. Youd figure that these libraries would be optimized to cache themselves on the rio properly so they arent downloading every time you make a change.

ok, time for some positives. Full control over image processing code, double precision floating points, "massively" parallel programming WITHOUT LOW LEVEL INTERRUPTS (yay), a huge library of analysis and mathematical functions at our disposal, professional-grade PID controllers (or P^3 1/I D controllers rather...), and all the well-timed subprocesses that you could ever need.

Its the first year we have been exposed to this powerful peice of hardware, but as with all upgrades there are always the bugs that need a squishin'. i say give it 2 years and we will start seeing more utilization of this controller's power.
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