cRIO Emulator?

[techhelpbb]

I am a mentor for Team 11 and we've run into this problem as well.

We have more than a dozen students to teach to program in Java, some far more experienced than others in Java itself, and while we have multiple cRIO they are scattered in other robots and systems that don't lend themselves to the inexperienced writing code (too much risk of damage).

In the interim one of the team leaders and an increasing number of the more experienced students worked up emulation for the joystick and victors. It's rough, it's also very early stages.

However, basically you can create X and Y joystick input and feed it to virtual victors that display their percentage of pulse width in some windows.

It's very light on documentation right now and it'll take some effort to install it (it was tested with NetBeans), but I'll submit the link to forum for anyone that it might help.

http://code.google.com/p/frcjcss/

Eventually we hope to add some interesting features to this, but I don't want to pressure the students writing this too much right now. So until we get things a little more under control I'll let the students control the flow of effort at their pace.

Eventually I will say it would be possible to tweak this to produce virtual encoder feedback and even graph the various outputs versus time so that complicated processes like PID loops are a little more apparent. Something I think would be invaluable as last year one of our students spent a ton of time working up an entirely new and complicated PID style software for our robot and it's very hard to explain what it does and when without graphics.