Statistics on top 20 teams?

[slavik262]

I think a lot of the questions about the robot and control system are great, but some of the programming questions leave me confused as to what can be gained by their answers.

Originally Posted by taichichuan

What language did they use?

As it's been said many times, the language used is really just a preference issue. You should really just go with whatever your team is most comfortable with. Some like the graphical environment of LabVIEW. Others like Java or C++. My team personally uses C++ because we have the most experience in it and like the flexibility, but again, the language you use should be whichever one your programmers will be most productive in.

Originally Posted by taichichuan

Threaded code or just poll in the teleop loop?

In terms of performance, a single thread will run faster since the cRIO is a single-core processor and less threads cause less time to be spent on context switching. We had a huge bug with the watchdog tripping this year because our extra threads were hogging too much CPU time. That said, you can play around with task priority or cause your tasks to sleep when they're not needed to make up for it in performance (i.e. have a task that updates your PWM outputs sleep the length of the Victor/Jaguar update speed).

Originally Posted by taichichuan

Did you use the Classmate for programming your robot or student/school supplied computers?

I'm confused how this has anything to do with how a team would perform. I guess I'm assuming this poll is to see what can be learned from the top 20 teams so that other teams can use this knowledge to become better themselves.