CoreChart - What do you think?

[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by Miroslav

We are keen to create a more level playing field for the beginner or novice programmers to use an industry strength graphical assembler to program the IFI controllers.

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CoreChart robotics / embedded software skills development have been used to raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Commerce Department (or Economic Development Boards as we call them in Australia) and electronics and non electronics businesses (banks, mining companies, car and wine manufacters etc) in order to sustain a long term development of a niche microchip embedded software industry. As a result thousands of students are learning CoreChart linked to science and mathematics curriculum.

I understand that CoreChart is a graphical assembler - but I am still not convinced of its application to FIRST. It requires a huge understanding of how the internals of the PIC work, and I believe some serious assembly experience. I think it could be an excellent tool for teaching highschool students assembly and the architecture of the PIC microcontroller, but I really don't think its going to make coding for the FIRST competition any easier than in C.

In fact, I really think it would be more work. Take a look at the .LST file that mcc outputs from your code - every line is one instruction cycle (4 clock cycles), and every line with an assembly instruction (movwf, movff, iorwf, andwf, etc) would be a block in core chart. It's a good way to show how your code looks so simple in C but ends up being inefficient, but I don't think its a good way to make programming any easier.

Shouldn't the point of coding with one of these "chart programming" things be to have every team - from experienced ones to rookies - have an autonomous mode that does something? CoreChart puts you at such a low level (being assembly), that I see even experienced teams not being able to create autonomous modes on it.