Opinions wanted: LabView-based controller?

[eugenebrooks]

I mentored robot programming during the pbasic days, including writing state machines with students to handle autonomous operation. It was a breath of fresh air to switch to a C based system, polluted by the requirements of an 8 bit micro-controller as it is, and have the opportunity to teach students to program the robot controller in C. In doing this the students learn something that is applicable to their future college experience.

I can't say that I have spent a lot of time with Labview, but I was not very impressed with the use of labview to do initial work with the CMU camera. We ended up tossing these activities to develop variations of the camera software Kevin Watson provided. I don't see the value in students learning a proprietary programming system that they may never see again.

I have the strong opinion that a conventional C environment should be offered for any future robot controller, and I am not referring here to snippets of C code to be buried in some larger graphical programming environment. It would be great to have a controller along the lines of what Labview runs on, but it is clear that we will not be able to afford to buy these controllers looking at the prices for them. Being able to have controllers to use in development efforts outside of the actual robot is important and the EDU contoller provided by IFI went along way to satisfying this need at cheap prices.

To be blunt, I resonate with Alan here, highly skilled and dedicated programming mentors will drop out of the FIRST FRC program if they are forced to move away from a C programming environment. If this is where FIRST is headed with its new controller, for whatever reason it is headed in this direction, it needs to consider the error of its ways. I would suggest, instead, that a more rational ANSI C programming environment, with a suitable debugger interface be offered. It is perfectly okay to offer something in addition to that, but failing to offer a conventional C environment would be an error. One could add to this a Java environment, or any other additional environment like easy C, etc, even LabView, but these things sould be in addition to and not intending to supplant a conventional C environment.


Eugene