Spoiler: Could this be the new software for the FRC 2006?

[roboticsguy1988]

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

Bahh... I think you programmers are overlooking something. While it might be easier for the initiated, C++ is a nightmare to learn in a matter of weeks for people with no prior experience. For small teams who barely get away with programming enough code to make their robot move in a few directions, this thing could be a godsend. For people who don't understand C, this could help them to actually have some autonomous code among other cool features that wouldn't have been possible before. True, it would be a bad thing to require the use of it for all FIRST teams, as many teams have programmers that are fully capable of coding in C, but I think it's shortsighted to blast something that you aren't familiar with.

Ultimately, used as another tool to help teams get off the ground faster, this thing could be great.

^^^ Totally in agreeance

[Tazlikesrobots]

I've seen a demo of the software that VEX will use and it is very similar to this. It contains pre-written sub routines, but you can still write your own. The best part is that you do not need to know the language and still be able to generate code...

[Hutch]

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

Bahh... I think you programmers are overlooking something. While it might be easier for the initiated, C++ is a nightmare to learn in a matter of weeks for people with no prior experience. For small teams who barely get away with programming enough code to make their robot move in a few directions, this thing could be a godsend. For people who don't understand C, this could help them to actually have some autonomous code among other cool features that wouldn't have been possible before. True, it would be a bad thing to require the use of it for all FIRST teams, as many teams have programmers that are fully capable of coding in C, but I think it's shortsighted to blast something that you aren't familiar with.

Ultimately, used as another tool to help teams get off the ground faster, this thing could be great.

Perhaps then people should get familiar with C before the season? I can understand why this might be good, but at the same time, it kind of punishes the people who really know what they are doing, IMHO. Besides, part of the FIRST experience is exposing people to things they'd find in the real world, and in the case of programming, that's C and not some drag and drop thing.

[roboticsguy1988]

Originally Posted by Hutch

Perhaps then people should get familiar with C before the season? I can understand why this might be good, but at the same time, it kind of punishes the people who really know what they are doing, IMHO. Besides, part of the FIRST experience is exposing people to things they'd find in the real world, and in the case of programming, that's C and not some drag and drop thing.

Right. You are almost exactly right. This would be a "beginner" thing to help people starting out learn some basic things of C then after there first season they can spend time learning the real stuff for the second season.

I believe you are wrong on the real world thing from what i understand. Most of the time yes its learning the true language like C or whatever and flat out coding. But form what i understand there are places that use things like this all the time. In the REAL WORLD the is a easy way and a hard way. The easy way is a quick solution that you can't do much with and isn't very efficient. The hard way is a time consuming more efficient solution that you can do everything with. Most of the time in the real world you have to deal with the "hard way" a lot more.

In the real world there are times where you know nothing at all and have to learn it on the spot, and most of the times are that way. But then there are other times when you can spend time and learn it well.

This is an example. You have the time to use this program and learn some basic stuff from it. That will start you out. Then you can move on to the real code and stuff in between the first and second season. I believe if everyone does it this way there going to learn so much more and its going to stick in there brain so much better.

Wouldn't you rather have someone learn it and have it stick with them rather than learn it and not stick with them?

Anyway thats my $.02 worth. You can agree or disagree... i am just stating my opinion on how i think students would learn better.

[Miroslav]

Originally Posted by roboticsguy1988

^^^ Totally in agreeance

CoreChart does have a very user friendly interface. But it is a real assembler. CoreChart is 1:1 with machine code ( assembler ) instructions, 32K of
PIC memory means you can use 16K ( 16000+ ) instructions.

CoreChartFR includes the operating system for FRC, but CoreChart and CoreChart Professional are used on bare PIC chips to program real world PIC products.

CoreChart is industry strength and it is used by engineers in defence and scientific research organisations because it is simple to get started and speeds up PIC applications. The dramatic reduction of "time to market" by CoreChart in PIC applications is critical to a business in the real world.

As an example, one industrial product of ours is called an 'Intercooler Spay
Controller' for turbo cars. It measures ( to 1% accuracy ) the duty cycle of
the fluctuating car ignition injectors, and 2 temperatures, and 2 adjustment
pots at a sample rate of 10,000 samples per second, then evaluate and output a high speed control signal as well as an updated LED display - all at the same time in real time on the car to cool the turbocharger so it does not
overheat. This is no big deal. The big deal is that CoreChart enabled the
software to be written using just 200 instructions ( which uses 400 bytes of
memory ) on a 1k PIC chip running at 4MHz - which leaves lots of room for
expansion. The product is getting rave reviews and is selling very well.

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Alexander McGee

Bah, I'll stick with LabVIEW. Once I figured out how to control the RC with LabVIEW, I haven't looked at C code.

I'm very interested in how you control the RC with LabVIEW. I've looked at many different methods of control but currently LabVIEW cannot target the IFI controller and you cannot communicate with the RC via LabVIEW without jacking the OI radio modem and reverse-engineering the communications protocol, which I would not recommend without IFI's permission. Care to share?

-Danny