Thoughts on the new Control System by a Beta Tester

[dbeck103]

103 has been working with the new control system for the past 5 weeks and I thought I would post my thoughts on the new system. I am not a programmer and understand enough to get by. I know what we have to do but leave it to the programmers to make the magic happen. My initial thoughts on the controls was that in Jan. this was going to be a disaster, however I believe that having the beta testing occur it will help alleviate the pain. WE have had a lot of success working with this new system, the only problems have been in upgrading the firmware and using laptops. I believe that most of those problems are now non issues. We are using labview and the 2 mentors that we have working on the beta system are well versed in Labview and have been able to put the controls and program them into last years bot. Labview, utilized in the Crios, in my opinion provides a lot more flexibility for this years Robot design. We have not been able to work with C++ yet but from what I hear that should work as well. In our opinion Labview is the way to go. Gone is the use of Easy C and that will cause problems in Jan when teams go to program their bots and do not have anyone who can program in labview or C++. There will be default programs that will help but not knowing those programs will create havoc. We are continuing the testing for the next two weeks and will be at Brunswick Eruption on Nov 1 and Ramp Riot on Nov 8. We are hoping to webcast our seminar at Ramp Riot.