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Unread 24-03-2009, 17:36
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Bongle Bongle is offline
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Re: cRIO, has it 'upped the game'?

I've thought about this a bit more, and have a theory for why we're seeing answers from emphatic YES!-es to less-enthusiastic "ho-hum, nothing new here".

I think there are multiple ways to answer this question, and I'll give my answers to each formulation of the question:

Did it raise the game of the least-competitive team? Probably not: a team that couldn't program last year still will be perplexed by the cRio, which will not be helped by the more-complex setup procedures.

Did it raise the game of a 25th-percentile team? Probably: once setup was complete, labview allows for nearly anyone to hack together a very basic robot program, add new motors, maybe even a limit switch or two. Just add the motors and link them to joystick buttons or axes and you're done. Granted, you could do this on the IFI controllers (pwm03 = oi_input1_x), but it required you to be able to read and understand C++ in order to figure out that that was the line of code you needed to add. Labview is a bit easier.

Did it raise the game of a 50th-percentile team? I'd say probably to definitely: No-penalty floating-point use in C, the quite reliable WPILib and the easy-to-use advanced labview VIs probably helped teams in the middle of the pack for whom things like PID control or camera tracking was previously far out of reach. I taught a first-year programmer from another team the basics of what a PID loop was, how to add it to his robot, and how to tune it in an hour at the Waterloo regional. That would've been unthinkable on the IFI controllers.

Did it raise the game of an elite 99th-percentile team? Most likely not: These teams were already capable of using whatever sensor or control technique they wanted in the pre-cRio days, no matter the difficulty of integrating it with the IFI controller. These teams had/have the experience and/or mentors who knew how to get things done no matter the controller.

So really, the answer to this thread's posed question depends entirely on how you interpret the question. Most of the 'no' answers I've seen are probably coming from teams in the latter category. Personally, I think the cRio is something of a field-leveler, at least until the more-advanced features are allowed to be unleashed.

Last edited by Bongle : 24-03-2009 at 17:39.
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