Programming with the 2009 controller

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Phalanx

So my question to ask, would be, just how many Mentors have a strong working knowledge of Labview to meet this new challenge, and of these how many of them would be willing and interested to provide multiple hands on workshops to teach the rest of us and students as well?

I'm planning on doing just that for the Central Texas FIRST teams, probably sometime over the summer. I figured we'd start off with basic LabVIEW skills programming exercises from the "LabVIEW Basics I and II" provided in your KOP. Then for the next class it'll be "Bring your NXT day" and we'll learn how to program the NXT in LabVIEW using the NXT Toolkit. Then, once the new cRIO system is released, we'll hold a workshop on programming with the new cRIO FRC toolkit (I imagine it'll be a toolkit). Those who do all 3 classes should be ready for business.

As the summer draws closer we'll organize something and post details on 418's website.

-Danny

[Jon236]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

I was with you up until right there. Even Dean Kamen has come out and publicly said that FIRST is not about teaching engineering, it's about inspiration. I figured I'd throw that out there since it gets thrown in my face enough as it is.

-Danny

Danny,

That's true....but what I find inspires these kids is getting them to the point of competency with the programming. I expect them to write the VI's to perform autonomous, control the drives and other actuators and implement feedback control, as well as being able to debug.

I don't expect them to become LabView experts....but I DO want to leave them with that taste of wanting more. THAT's what I call inspiration.

BTW, will the FRC Toolkit VI's that I have be of any use?

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Jon236

That's true....but what I find inspires these kids is getting them to the point of competency with the programming. I expect them to write the VI's to perform autonomous, control the drives and other actuators and implement feedback control, as well as being able to debug.

All of which I firmly believe will be the case and then some; no matter what we did, if we didn't do that then we'd be doing a disservice to the competition.

Originally Posted by Jon236

I don't expect them to become LabView experts....but I DO want to leave them with that taste of wanting more. THAT's what I call inspiration.

I think that might be going on my quote board. That's what FIRST should be all about.

Originally Posted by Jon236

BTW, will the FRC Toolkit VI's that I have be of any use?

You mean the FRC Simulation and Modeling Toolkit VIs we provided for the IFI controller? Nope. That toolkit was designed specifically for the IFI controller since we couldn't do the kinds of things we can do with the cRIO. Unfortunately we had to look at the IFI controller like a black box, and use the USB DAQ device to programmatically inject "fake" sensor data to make the controller think its sensors and such were actually giving it live data, and then we used the Dashboard to peek at what was going on behind the scenes to see what the results were. With this mechanism the modeling environment was extremely specific, and you were limited as to what you could do (forget modeling the camera inputs!!).

Teams that use LabVIEW should be able to do all this within a LabVIEW environment on their laptops/computers without the need to do hardware-in-the-loop simulations. That way the electronics team isn't yelled at for stealing sensors and the controller. It would probably take an average team a day to a week to set up an environment to model for their specific robot, depending on how complex it is (and, of course, I've never tried modeling crab or meccanum (sp?) drives, so that might require some additional thought).

-Danny

[ayeckley]

Originally Posted by Jon236

I don't expect them to become LabView experts....but I DO want to leave them with that taste of wanting more. THAT's what I call inspiration.

[Flame suit] That's what I call marketing. NI has been targeting engineering students for years with their academic programs. Get them hooked in college, so when they graduate they'll be more likely to specify NI products because they are most familiar with them, not necessarily because they are the best-suited products to fulfill their needs. The colleges don't object because they can pack their labs with newer equipment which helps their recruiting efforts. Now NI has decided that college isn't early enough - they are now targeting high-school students.

I've got nothing at all against the marketing business, however I think it's key to be able to recognized when you are being "marketed to". It's certainly not unique to NI. I can think of lots of companies that do this (going at least as far back as the Apple ][.[/Flame suit]

Personally, I'm trying to keep an open mind about this change. I'll reserve judgement (positive OR negative) until the dust settles after the 2009 season. I definitly don't think this is a no-brainer great move for FIRST though.

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by ayeckley

I've got nothing at all against the marketing business, however I think it's key to be able to recognized when you are being "marketed to". It's certainly not unique to NI. I can think of lots of companies that do this (going at least as far back as the Apple).

DUH! Look at the Kit of Parts. Don't you see that as one big marketing bucket? You should. Autodesk, IFI, AndyMark, BaneBots, NI, the list is too long for me to list. You don't think they are providing parts out of the goodness of their heart, do you? You don't think FedEx donates shipping "just because" do you? It's the hope of ALL of the suppliers that you'll give them repeat business. That you'll recognize them as being leaders in innovation because they're donating (or providing at a significantly reduced price) to FIRST. Opening ceremonies are marketing blitz events. Closing ceremonies are marketing blitz events. Awards given out are marketing blitz events. FIRST SURVIVES on marketing revenue almost entirely. If you didn't already know that then hopefully you do now.

If anything you should THANK the suppliers and sponsors of FIRST for letting you have access to technology and goods at a price significantly lower than you could have on your own. That's where FIRST's main value is in my mind - you don't get the level of exposure at the same price point anywhere else.

-Danny

[Phalanx]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

You mean the FRC Simulation and Modeling Toolkit VIs we provided for the IFI controller? Nope. That toolkit was designed specifically for the IFI controller since we couldn't do the kinds of things we can do with the cRIO. Unfortunately we had to look at the IFI controller like a black box, and use the USB DAQ device to programmatically inject "fake" sensor data to make the controller think its sensors and such were actually giving it live data, and then we used the Dashboard to peek at what was going on behind the scenes to see what the results were. With this mechanism the modeling environment was extremely specific, and you were limited as to what you could do (forget modeling the camera inputs!!).

I'm of the opinion that while the new control system will be significantly different than the IFI control system, that the FRC Modeling Toolkit could still be a useful learning tool for those of us that need skill sets using Labview. I believe that by using it, it will help bring some better understanding in how to use Labview by working with environment, motors, and sensors we are already familiar with. Since we "know" how those systems are supposed to work, we could use it as a learning/teaching tool. Does this make sense? Or would there be a better approach?

[Chris_Elston]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

I'm planning on doing just that for the Central Texas FIRST teams, probably sometime over the summer. I figured we'd start off with basic LabVIEW skills programming exercises from the "LabVIEW Basics I and II" provided in your KOP.
-Danny

Danny,

Do you know if "strategic” cRIO controllers could be given to certain mentors in areas of the USA?

For example, I would not mind volunteering to teach a class like this myself say at the Indiana Forums in Kokomo. I could think of several other people like Alan Anderson, Alex from 1024, Josh Hambright and even our own student programmer Nathan House. However, we would need to get our hands on it and learn it first before we could teach others in our own area.

[Qbranch]

Originally Posted by Chris_Elston

Danny,

Do you know if "strategic” cRIO controllers could be given to certain mentors in areas of the USA?

For example, I would not mind volunteering to teach a class like this myself say at the Indiana Forums in Kokomo. I could think of several other people like Alan Anderson, Alex from 1024, Josh Hambright and even our own student programmer Nathan House. However, we would need to get our hands on it and learn it first before we could teach others in our own area.

I'd definitely be interested, but remember I could only tele-mentor most of this comming build season (i'll be in college at UIUC). Thanks for the vote of confidence Chris.

I'm still planning on having a programming week this summer for the guys on our team who will be taking over for me. So far, we're still planning on doing it with the current PIC-based FRC controller, since the concepts still transfer, it's just the way you interact with the hardware that's changing (so far I'm still shooting to work with the Wind River C as opposed to the LabVIEW).

If anyone around our area is interested in attending the summer class (mostly on motion control) i'm having for my team, I think we could handle a few extra friendly faces. It's all tentative for right now.

But anyhow... we are working on getting a compact real-time backplane with the IO/expansion modules first is including... but one thing we aren't doing is paying full price.

And I thought $1195 was bad for the current control system... jeesh!

At any rate, we're trying to get one too... hopefully somebody will have a breakthrough!

-q

[neutrino15]

Originally Posted by Damien1247

Sadly the cRio will be Windows only

I hope that you can prog in C on Mac.. however, right from their site, Labview will support OSX and Linux:

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-1668

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Chris_Elston

Do you know if "strategic” cRIO controllers could be given to certain mentors in areas of the USA?

To my limited knowledge in this area, this is not a current consideration. As soon as the system is ready, the current plan is to roll it out to all teams at the same time. FIRST is handling the distribution, so they would be the final word, not me nor anyone at National Instruments. If there is going to be any kind of "strategic preview release", it would come from FIRST directly.

-Danny

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Phalanx

I'm of the opinion that while the new control system will be significantly different than the IFI control system, that the FRC Modeling Toolkit could still be a useful learning tool for those of us that need skill sets using Labview. I believe that by using it, it will help bring some better understanding in how to use Labview by working with environment, motors, and sensors we are already familiar with. Since we "know" how those systems are supposed to work, we could use it as a learning/teaching tool.

No. I want the current FRC Modeling Toolkit to die, it has no practical use for learning how to program LabVIEW nor how to program for the new FRC environment. We also don't have the 3rd tutorial and its incredibly necessary information - it was never sent to me, only the byte stream location that I posted here on Chief Delphi, and WPI seems to have "lost" what they had (so please stop asking for it).

You can still download the toolkit, but I am not going to maintain it nor explain it nor support it any longer. I hope that concepts from that particular toolkit will be reflected in the final product, but it would require waaaaaay too much work to maintain. Jon Mittelman from 236 suggested that I/we modify it to replicate what's going on with the FPGA and such, but the work required would be similar to writing the production interface itself - I'd rather just leave it to our LabVIEW team working on this to create a final project, not have two completely divergent branches of code (I also have better things to do with my time, like actually teaching LabVIEW with the tools already provided to teams).

-Danny

[TDohse]

Originally Posted by neutrino15

I hope that you can prog in C on Mac.. however, right from their site, Labview will support OSX and Linux:

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-1668

LabVIEW will run in Windows/Mac/Linux, but to deploy a real-time project to the cRIO will require Windows.

Originally Posted by Chris_Elston

Do you know if "strategic” cRIO controllers could be given to certain mentors in areas of the USA?

For example, I would not mind volunteering to teach a class like this myself say at the Indiana Forums in Kokomo. I could think of several other people like Alan Anderson, Alex from 1024, Josh Hambright and even our own student programmer Nathan House. However, we would need to get our hands on it and learn it first before we could teach others in our own area.

One thing to keep in mind is that you don't need the cRIO to learn LabVIEW. Students can start by writing the standard "Hello World!" program and work their way up to VIs performing useful tasks all on their PCs. You can write software emulators for sensor inputs or read in saved data if you want to build and test VIs related to robot control.

[Jon236]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

Jon Mittelman from 236 suggested that I/we modify it to replicate what's going on with the FPGA and such, but the work required would be similar to writing the production interface itself

-Danny

Danny,

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. What I had meant to propose is that the final Toolkit supplied to the Teams contain VI's which would enable the programmers to model their robot's behavior by running on the PC rather than the cRio. If this approach would involve duplicate work for the development team (modeling the FPGA itself), then could we use the program running on the cRio, monitoring the outputs on our custom 'Dashboard' and modeling the gear ratios and chosen motor characteristics?

In this way we could intelligently model the electrical system's load requirements under actual operating conditions, rather than watching for 'magic smoke'. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/im...lies/smile.gif

[Phalanx]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

Lastly, using C instead of LabVIEW can be a valuable crutch. Depending on when the controller gets in your hands and how much time you have to learn how to use it, having an out can make you more comfortable with the whole 6 week deadline thing. I would hope that teams would pick up the LabVIEW software we provided in the KOP, maybe even pick up an NXT robot and the LabVIEW NXT Toolkit, and learn how to use LabVIEW in the off season. However, that's not going to be possible for all teams. Giving a way to experiment with LabVIEW but being able to use some C code if necessary can help facilitate teams moving to using LabVIEW without being cornered into an all LabVIEW or all C/C++ situation.
-Danny

Danny,

Firstly thank you for your insights and knowledge with regards to this new control system and Labview.

This is most likely the direction we'll take. Subject to change of course.
Or "How I spent my summer Vacation"!

I'm planning on obtaining a Lego Mindstorm kit(~$250) and the additional rechargeable battery(~$50). I've downloaded the Labview NXT toolkit, and will attempt to learn and teach Labview within our Team.

Once the WindRiver, VxWorks, WPILib environment is ready we'll begin work porting our "C" code to it. This may be a bigger challenge, since we don't use Easy C or WPILib today, so some our "high performance" modular routines may not fit as nicely as we'd like.

At least this way we'll have options and choices, and hopefully enough skills to be ready for the new season.

[brianafischer]

Originally Posted by Chris_Elston

Does any one in this thread know if the 2009 controller can be programmed with the traditional industrial languages?

such as:

Ladder Logic
State Logic
Flow Chart Diagram
Structured Text (yup...C++ is Structured Text)

Are these optional? Or is labview only function block programming only?

National Instruments for YEARS has been bugging me to try a controller to replace the PLC (programmable logic controllers) I use in machine designs, and have said we can program in ladder logic, STL, flow chart, ST, when we switch over to this controller. That's where I am coming from with this question.

Or is C++ and function block (labview) the only options? And those other few mentioned in this thread....

Check out these links:

NI Labs - LabVIEW Ladder Diagram Editor
Welcome to NI LabVIEW Ladder Diagram Editor

According to this link: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/2856 the State Diagram Toolkit is supported on the cRIO

NI State Diagram Toolkit

-Brian