The increasing amount of pre-canned code

[Greg McKaskle]

That said, after spending 8+ hours debugging a firmware issue in the cRio this year (which turned out to be a problem in the 24vdc supply on the PD board), I would say that the cRio is definitely not as robust as the IFI system. While talking to the NI tech support, if they say "Ummm... That's Bad" then you know they must not have found that problem in their testing and aren't prepared to solve it. When a problem arises with this new system, there are so many more points of error that it's quite difficult to debug some times.

cRio boot times: They bug me. Waiting for the robot to boot is the most annoying thing there is. However, after talking to NI tech support for around 4 hours, he claims that the cRio itself boots in several seconds and then the FIRST code waits for FMS comm to timeout (25s) before loading the team code. Is this the case? If so, they could make the FMS timeout a little faster.

Sorry it took so long to debug.

Since the cRIO and many of the other control system are off the shelf, not specially designed for this competition, their interactions, especially when one of them is failing, is indeed something not that many people have seen. Also, the AEs are mostly new to this system too. They are familiar with NI products in normal usage.

As for the boot time. The cRIO FPGA is booted very quickly. The PPC typically boots in about ten. The bridge and other elements, the FRC specific tasks all take a bit longer. But the boot time isn't waiting for any particular element such as FMS to timeout -- no magic bullet.

Greg McKaskle