cRIO Emulator?

[AustinSchuh]

David,

I think that the goal here is to let new programmers work out the simpler code, without risking breaking the hardware. Of course, you can't tune a PID loop on it and expect it to work the exact same on a real robot, or tune the drivetrain to feel nice to drive, but if a new programmer accidentally sets the bot to spin in circles infinitely by accident, that won't cause any problems in the simulation. Once the programmer and mentors feel comfortable with the programmer's abilities, the simulator won't have as much value (without a lot of work being put into it to making it accurate).

When I try out new controls algorithms, I like to simulate them myself before putting them on a real bot. And I know what I'm doing. Simulation helps cheaply catch simple bugs and generally has a faster test cycle than testing on a real robot.