Beta testers: Is anyone creating a HAL implementation for the cRIO?

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by Colby Skeggs

There already IS an abstraction layer over the hardware abstraction layer.

It's called WPILib.

Fair enough. Don't need yet another abstraction for my purposes then.

The HAL may work as a layer at which to do the abstraction. However, doing so will require a significant amount of null code for things like the PDP, PCM, Power API, builtin accelerometer, analog outputs, etc. Besides that, there appear to be a large number of platform-specific calls. (These may, however, be very similar to the cRIO calls. The bird's-eye-view of the HAL looks surprisingly similar to the cRIO's FPGA interface.)

Yep. Given that they both use the underlying NI chipobject stuff as their interface to the hardware, it's not that surprising that it's similar -- which is why I think it would be easy for anyone wanting to create a HAL to do so. I suspect that the initial implementation of HAL involved cut/paste all the ChipObject stuff from the existing WPILib implementation into the HAL code.

Still - this is your project. I suspect you could ask the WPILib team for the parts of the HAL code that they're okay with making public (or access them directly after talking to them) and then start the project of supporting the cRIO with it yourself. If you stick it on GitHub or somewhere similar, you might be able to get other teams to help out.

The source for HAL is all included in the WPILib source, so that part is covered. I might do a HAL implementation at some point if someone else doesn't do it first. I also have a large backlog, which is why I was hoping someone else had already done it.