Quote:
Originally Posted by Abrakadabra
Sorry guys, but requiring today's students to have an understanding of assembly language, or knowing how to build their own outboard processor, much less how to cram an image processing algorithm into 4K of RAM, is just not going to cut it anymore.
|
You know, as a software engineer I have to comment on this one. Sure, technology has moved a long way from these things, but I can tell you with certainty that the best software engineers that I personally work with all know how to work with assembly language. Saying that we shouldn't bother with teaching that any more because technology has moved on is just as short-sighted as saying that there's no point in teaching kids how to do arithmetic or calculus by hand since there's calculators available that can do the work for them.
Having said that, you're exaggerating the difficulty of working with the IFI system dramatically. I consider my team to be one of the most advanced users of the control system, and we never wrote a single line of assembly code. I know many powerhouse teams that have never built an offboard processor. You're just making stuff up to make your own position sound better.
Quote:
|
They may think it was "bulletproof", but what they often forget is that it was a very daunting platform for most kids who were probably encountering their first embedded programming platform, usually without any kind of expert guidance, and certainly with very little entry-level documentation.
|
I'm amazed that you'd try to use this as an argument. You must not have gone through the unbelievable hassle and headache that was the process of setting up WindRiver for the new control system last year. Our team has experts who work with VxWorks, WindRiver, and various RTOSes and debuggers every day, and yet it still took us hours to get things installed and configured correctly. And even then, WindRiver would randomly not work at times, or lose the connection to the target, etc. Comparing the approachability of the IFI system versus the new control system is probably not a good idea if you're trying to make a case that the new one is better. Just go look at the numerous threads from last year around kickoff of all the people that had issues setting up their system, getting software installed, etc.