NI Week Athena Announcement and Q&A Panel

[apalrd]

Originally Posted by magnets

NI said that Java was an arcane language, and was part of the problem with current education is that students learn it, yet they are going to be announcing a controller that will probably work with Java.
There's a feature to zoom in the NXT programming language, but STILL NO ZOOM IN LABVIEW

-I agree with those thoughts on Java. Nothing against Java as a language, but IMO every introduction to programming I've seen for students that works in Java primarily teaches the concepts of object-oriented programming and Java syntax before actual programming concepts in general. I don't think OO is the only way to program, and a class that starts and only touches Java will promote a much more closed way of thinking about programming

-Every day I work in Simulink, I'm like 'man this is a big subsystem, I should zoom in' and then I zoom in. And then later I zoom out. AND THEN I GO BACK TO LABVIEW AND CANT ZOOM.



@everyone, Thoughts on the new controller:
-I think the expansion port is great for packaging, and allows plenty of additional IO, but I think it's going to be JUST that - a place where you can plug in a break out board to use the additional PWM/GPIO/ADC signals when you need them. I don't think more than a few teams will actually make something else for this port. Maybe a company or two, but basically no teams.
--I'm not worried about enough IO, but a few more ADC's would be nice for extra datalogging. Buzz18 uses 5 of 7 and Buzz 17 used 6 of 7, and it's nice to look at other analog signals every now and then. I also wonder if the 5v/3.3v supply is monitored by the ADC separately because we like to look at that for diagnostics, and previously used a jumper in adc7 to do this, which consumes an analog channel.

-The spec lists integrated 3-axis accelerometer. I wonder why they didn't include a gyro on this, since a gyro is definitely a way more useful sensor for FRC. I have never found a use for a chassis-mounted accelerometer in FRC.

-No spec on boot times as far as I can tell. Dissappointing. The radio issue demonstrated by 2468 almost made a joke out of the current boot times.

-OS is listed as RT Linux, which will definitely make some people very happy, but I don't really care that much. I still think we're brute-forcing the CPU loading issues rather than considering efficient design in quite a few places (outside of user code).

-Hopefully the download times improved. They were just purely awful this year. I know that was because of a LV RT bug, but it's still totally unacceptable in every way that it made it past testing like that.

-Maybe if I can get one early enough it'll push me to design something better. Who knows. But releasing software on kickoff is just crazy, I mean we really do have to install LV and new Driver Station and new Utilities on a whole bunch of computers, and there isn't even anything game related in a new version of software. I too would like to see the new controller and software in my hand at least 6mos before 2015 kickoff.