Comments/Complaints on NI control system

[Schnabel]

Things I like about the new control system, from someone who hasn't played with one in over a year and knows very little about the technical side of it.

No backup battery! Remember back in the "good ol days" what would happen if you had a weak main battery and tried to communicate with the robot? Yeah exactly, nothing, then a reboot.

Industry Standard. I think it's cool that we have switched to a device that is being used elsewhere to produce products we use everyday. It's not exactly the same, but in the future we will have to deal with long start up times and many of the problems we deal with here. The difference is that lost time in industry means lost money.

WIFI! Who doesn't love WIFI? You can say that we are trying to run too much through WIFI, but last I checked (Where I live that is) I can run multiple videos through my wireless N router, plus have everyone connect to it to surf, view, and download a ton of content. The bottle neck for us though isn't the WIFI itself, but more the internet bandwith. I never have a problem transfering files over WIFI though, even with 56 computers, iPods, XBOX's, PS3's, ect. connected to it.

USB! When's the last time you saw a joystick connector on a computer?

Room for improvement! Yes the CRIO is way to powerful for us. Will it be in 5 years though? If you can't answer that, think of this, your computer is faster than you need to run nicely today, will it be in 2 years?

Issues!!! Last time I checked, the best way to solve issues was to try to find a fix, not complain about them until someone else tried to find a solution. This is great experience to trying to solve the issues ourselves.

Yes I do feel that the IFI system had it's advantages, but this new system does too, so why don't we just try to adapt and accept that this is the system we will be using now, not the old system.

[apalrd]

Originally Posted by Schnabel

Issues!!! Last time I checked, the best way to solve issues was to try to find a fix, not complain about them until someone else tried to find a solution. This is great experience to trying to solve the issues ourselves.

As most of my problems are on the Classmate end, I have exactly no control over it. It has bugs, but I have no source code to modify and fix it. The fixes I have take too long to implement (e.g. rebooting twice when loosing Cypress IO), or are way more difficult than they should be (e.g. tearing apart a USB joystick that dosen't have an auto-centering axis and soldering all of my IO to that) As for the NI controller, other than the long times I like it very much. Most of the problems with it (ejecting modules) can be fixed with duck tape and such, and I really like the ability to probe things while they are running. The cRio is not the majority of the problem, it is the rest of the system implemented to make it work. Many of my complaints are on the Classmate end.

@Greg: That thing I mentioned about probes, it isn't a problem to have a probe open while the code loads, but it is a problem to place a probe while waiting for code. It seems to be a bug in LabVIEW RT, not the FRC specific software.