NI Week

[Kevin Sevcik]

Before you start shelling out cash for this, remember that programming on the FRC controller isn't going to be the same as programming on the cRIO. For instance, the second class on FPGA programming will be completely useless to you next year. The first class on Real Time programming could potentially be useful, but it depends on the structure of the code that NI, WPI, and FIRST lock us into. If they declare that thou shalt have only one user thread and it shall have the lowest priority... Well then a lot of threading and other things you'll be learning aren't going to be incredibly useful. Finally, the class obviously isn't going to have any info whatsoever on the actual WPI/NI/FRC libraries, which are going to be a large percentage of the actual programming.

So I'm not saying it's useless.... but if you're going to need to fly there, rent a hotel, register, etc.... well your money might be better spent on a LEGO NXT and the restricted version of Labview you can use to program it so you can get more hands on in depth experience with Labview style coding. I think several months of hacking on a LEGO NXT are likely to be more useful in the long run than a few hours crammed full of Labview RT details.