NEW 2009 Control System Released

[comphappy]

I feel like people keep missing this:

What is the cost of cRIO? Will this change raise the entry cost for teams?
A No. Due to the investment being made by NI ($10M over 5 years) and NI’s suppliers, FIRST will
provide teams with a more powerful control system without raising the cost to compete. Because
there are many factors that determine the final price of the kit of parts, the exact entry price has
not been determined yet.

While it may be expensive hardware, they are making it available with out raising the costs of entry.

I just unwrapped labview and installed it from this years KOP, looks interesting. As a lead programmer, founder of our team, and soon to be senior, I must look out for the future of the team. While i am an ardent supporter and advocate of ASM and C, LabView has a lot of potential for sustainability, while holding the real world experience that EasyC and what ever that other thing was lack.

As for the all around control system it has a lot of potential, I am peeved that the FPGA will be very limited if not completely lock away from us, I think that would have left us all where we wanted to be with the full spectrum of options.

I am just waiting for the day when our robots have full server racks crunching numbers so hard we dont have to worry about who is going to drive the robot, unfortunately i don't think I will be a team programmer that day, but I sure hope I will be the mentor watching this realized.