cRio development language C/C++ vs LabView

[aldaeron]

Hi All,

Hope you are having a great summer. I wanted to get some advice from teams that have used LabView and C/C++ using the WindRiver.

A little background on our team is pertinent. We are a college Robotics Club at the Colorado School of Mines that sponsors an FRC team. In addition to FRC we have other projects of our own that the college students are working on.

I was recently working on a demo using an NXT and was trying to do it in LabView. Perhaps it was the lack of functions (VIs) but I was having a terrible time getting a decent program running. In particular I was having trouble keeping track of the cumulative angle a motor has turned thus far in the program. I downloaded RobotC and was able to be 10,000 times more productive and solve my problem with a single function call. To be fair, I have at least 10 years experience with text based languages and very little with LabView.

I am really trying not to be biased and I do see that LabView is powerful (a coworker at Northrop Grumman build an entire vibration controller and analyzer system using LabView). My concern is that LabView is a less useful skill in the real world generally speaking. Most coding is done in text based languages. LabView is a proprietary system that works on limited hardware. LabView does not work on an Arduino or a PIC or a CUDA device or any other Microcontroller (at least to my knowledge).

We are working on an improved curriculum for our students (high school and college) and my thought is that if we base it in C or C++ that they will learn more useful and transferable skills for later in life. I realize that using C/C++ may be a little more work for FIRST since there are a lot of existing useful VIs for simple things like basic motor control from a joystick. Something tells me someone has some open source code for these on their Team website.

I am very interested to hear opinions and thoughts, especially from teams which have tried both.

Thanks!

Matt