Purchasing the 2009 controller

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by yoyodyne

In the table of programming environments for NXT http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html

It says that the NI Labview Toolkit lacks events, bluetooth, floating point?, and data logging. - Is this true?

NI LabVIEW NXT Toolkit Lacks Events - TRUE*.
NI LabVIEW NXT Toolkit Lacks ability to partner the NXT Brick to 3rd party Bluetooth Devices - TRUE.
NI LabVIEW NXT Toolkit Lacks ability to do floating point - TRUE**.
NI LabVIEW NXT Toolkit Lacks Automatic Data Logging Mechanism - TRUE***.

* - You don't really think the cRIO supports interrupts, do you?
** - I say true only because that's what I've always been told, I am having a hard time finding the correct resource to completely back that claim up 100%.
*** - You can always data log yourself, by writing data to a file as it's read.

Originally Posted by yoyodyne

Do you know if RobotC, which seems to have a Yes in every column at least for a windows environment would be useful training?

If you are an FTC team, or an FRC team that has never worked with C before and direly want to learn C, I will say ABSOLUTELY. However, the C interface is looking to be quite different between how you program an NXT device and the cRIO (only based on what I know about programming VxWorks' C interface and RobotC for NXT). As it stands right now I cannot say anything definitive about how the cRIO C/C++ interface is going to resemble anything you can get your hands on today without buying a VxWorks development license (I wouldn't even consider it).

Originally Posted by yoyodyne

I guess that would depend on what WPI is planning on putting over VxWorks.

Exactly, for C/C++ I'm afraid I must agree it's primarily in the hands of WPI. While NI is providing some support and working with WindRiver on the toolchain, WPI is leading the charge in most all other respects for this aspect of programming the system.

-Danny