[dcherba]

This thread has really touched on a number of issues without really taking a top down approach to identify them.

The Crio is a very capable box outfitted with the interfaces that were developed for the robot application.

The Crio is expensive when low budget teams look at the expense of multiple units. This will drive the teams to exploring alternative solutions for code development and practice robots.

Some of the standard software methods embedded in the hardware libraries are not as realtime friendly as they need to be. (image handling let a lone processing an image) I spent a lot of time digging in the libraries so that I would not shotgun solutions. The library skew on some of the releases and the multiple copies of things really caused a lot of confusion when trying to identify were the actual problems were. Having copies of the WPI libraries in three places was confusing.

The WPI library is an awsome start to robot control language interface.

The WindRiver tools with license issues can be a limiting factor.

The movement towards Java would reduce the dependency on the more expensive development tools and make the code development environment more available to more students.

There is no reason we can not develop a simulator for the basic WPI library that will run on either windows, or linux. The level of simulation and how to provide feedback is however complex.

I spent 20 years designing and applying programmable logic controller. The reason regular computers were not used in these control application is that the standard OS methods of thread control produce undesirable issues that degrade quality of control.

While the hardware is a great platform diving into the libraries to fix some of the quality of control issues will require a style of software methodology that we do not teach in computer science or engineering. In fact as faculty we would fail students if they used some of the methods required to solve the realtime control issues. (ironic actually)

There is a real differnce between designing something that works most of the time and something that works all the time for 30 years.

David Cherba