cRIO, has it 'upped the game'?

[Mike Hendricks]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

The build time kills me, In the past changing the direction of a motor or a value, compiling, then downloading took a minute tops, less if you had an embedded serial port.

With Labview, I'm scared to let any development happen at the regional, because of the several minutes it takes to download. Not to mention, THREE times at Los Angeles, LabView locked up during the deploy and had to be exited. At this point, the robot wasn't running, and we had to restart labview, reconnect, redeploy. We may be doing something wrong, and I may be lacking a detail or two, but this pains me.

For once, we finally see eye to eye on something. We had Labview lock up on us several times at both of our regionals and had to run through a similar cycle. Not really sure if we should blame our ancient programming laptop (which is a P3 that ran MPLab and the IFI software like a champ), or Labview. Sadly, we didn't have the money this year to splurge on a new programming laptop. We've had similar issues with Labview in previous years when using it to work with the old CMU camera. We weren't able to get our camera working as we wanted to, but that was more of a fault to our programmers, not the hardware or provided software. Our team shared the same feeling as far as programming changes, especially since it could easily take 30 minutes to update a single thing in the program.

As far as the cRIO goes, I had my reservations about the system, and I still have them. Our IFI controllers have never failed us, and it never took 6 hours to get the field running on practice day (LA regional). Given, it wasn't the fault of the cRIO - but still frustrating none the less. I worked with a team in San Diego for several hours with pneumatics problems only to find out that the D I/O on the Sidecar was bad (the PWMs worked fine, and so did the relays) and wasn't able to read the pressure switch to turn the compressor on. It is a little bit annoying to have to plug the driver station into power in addition to tethering it to the robot. They solved this on the field with POE switches, but that doesn't help you when you're getting the robot inspected or on the practice field. Maybe we've just been spoiled by the tether providing power on the IFI system.

I know our mentor involvement as far as programming this year was concerned was minimal, but I'm not too sure if that was a result of the new control system or the game in general. Our robot was very simple this year, and had minimal feedback systems. In the past we've opted to use steering wheels (which required a lot of programming for the controller to interpret how we wanted it to move) and potentiometers/encoders for feature control, but they weren't needed this year, and we went for 2 stick tank drive.

I think I'm going to share Jon's view and reevaluate this in a couple years.