FRC Blogged - The 2015 Control System Request for Proposa

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by BigJ

While I agree, I feel like it is a LOT easier for me to use doubles with the kids and not have to do hacky-ish integer decimal place preservation stuff like I did back in the day.

At this point the students should be learning how to program and solve problems given to them, not wrestle with limitations of the hardware or learning embedded software engineer levels of optimization. I feel like making the robot work with the entire rest of the team putting everything on your shoulders "working within constraints" enough

This is all just my opinion, but a simpler controller without sacrificing the ability to freely program is fine by me.

This raises for me a question...

Which do you hold more important:

1. Floating point math
2. Threading / multiprocessing

The cRIO's support for floating point math is admirable.
It surely does reduce the need to explain the basic math.

However, personally, I've found that trying to explain how to build a state machine or get threading to work is bigger challenge. Just explaining how interrupts work is an exercise in digital processor design.

If you had to trade floating point math for a clear decisive ability to do multiple things basically at the same time without having to 'fudge' it which is the greater necessity?