Need some help with the new system.

[efoote868]

Hello CD,

I was away last season from FIRST, but now that I'm on a co-op this semester I'm back with my old team.
A lot has changed since I last touched the code (and I hope as a mentor I'll never touch it again, that's what students are for ). I have a couple of questions about this year's system.


Completely disregarding the legality of it in game, will the cRIO interface to another laptop? For instance, if I wanted to build this system myself, do I have to use that particular mini laptop?

Does labview have to be installed on the laptop that interfaces to the cRIO, or if not, what software needs to be installed? Will labview compile an executable, or what exactly happens?



That's about all I can think of for now, I'm sure I'll have a few more questions as I get answers.

[Mark McLeod]

You can use any PC to interface with the cRIO - Driver Station & Dashboard.
You only need to install the Driver Station Update. It's complete.

In competition, however, the Driver Station must be the Classmate netbook.
You can run the Dashboard on the Classmate too, or use a separate PC just for the Dashboard.


If you want to develop code for the robot (cRIO) you can program in LabVIEW, C++ or Java. All three come only on the installation DVDs in the KOP, but you only have to install what you'll be using plus a few shared National Instrument tools.

A LabVIEW project needs to be built and downloaded.

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by efoote868

Hello CD,
Completely disregarding the legality of it in game, will the cRIO interface to another laptop? For instance, if I wanted to build this system myself, do I have to use that particular mini laptop?

Its just a computer with an IP stack on it, nothing particularly special about it. It will talk to any computer on the same network. In fact, it even has an FTP server on it. I've written some software that allows you to put a webserver on it and interact with the software, and LabVIEW also has a web interface available.

Now of course, I know that you're talking about the driver station, but I'm just talking about all the other stuff you can do. If you search the forums, someone wrote a virtual driver station for last years driver station that you could run on a computer. Since this years driver station is written in LabVIEW, you should be able to move it from machine to machine.

Does labview have to be installed on the laptop that interfaces to the cRIO, or if not, what software needs to be installed? Will labview compile an executable, or what exactly happens?

I believe that you must have LabVIEW on the machine to run this years driver station software. It may be a standalone executable, but I don't believe so. I haven't really looked, but I know some others have been talking about it so just do a quick search. I'm also pretty sure that you can run the software on any old desktop, the NI guys said thats how they generally test it.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by virtuald

I believe that you must have LabVIEW on the machine to run this years driver station software. It may be a standalone executable, but I don't believe so. I haven't really looked, but I know some others have been talking about it so just do a quick search. I'm also pretty sure that you can run the software on any old desktop, the NI guys said thats how they generally test it.

To run a LabVIEW executable, you need the LabVIEW runtime engine. This is the same as how you need the .NET framework to run .NET executables. The DS installer installs the runtime engine (which is part of the reason it is so big). You do not need LabVIEW installed to run the DS software.

[jhersh]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

To run a LabVIEW executable, you need the LabVIEW runtime engine. This is the same as how you need the .NET framework to run .NET executables. The DS installer installs the runtime engine (which is part of the reason it is so big). You do not need LabVIEW installed to run the DS software.

The Dashboard on the other hand will complain about Vision DLLs if LabVIEW is not installed.