Teams happy with Wind River Workbench?

[xtreampb]

Originally Posted by gvarndell

'vi' is an editor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

The editor in Wind River Workbench has a vi compatible mode.
It also has an emacs compatible mode.

this didn't help me at all. What i got from the wiki is that VI is a fancy text editor??? do you have any more links?

[EricVanWyk]

Originally Posted by xtreampb

this didn't help me at all. What i got from the wiki is that VI is a fancy text editor??? do you have any more links?

vi and emacs are "fancy" text editors that have a bunch of features that make them more usable by people familiar with them. Steeper learning curve, but much more productivity.

VI compatibility mode means that windriver emulates that interface. This allows someone who is used to VI to be more productive.

There is a bit of a holy war as to which is better (emacs or vi), it simply boils down to a matter of preference.

[R.C.]

All and All guys I would like to thank NI for doing a great job. Atleast a company stepped up and created a platform for FIRST. I like both platforms , NI Crio and IFI. As time goes on, NI will make learning easier and I hope to see this platform stay for years to come.

-rc

[gvarndell]

Originally Posted by rc_cola1323

All and All guys I would like to thank NI for doing a great job. Atleast a company stepped up and created a platform for FIRST. I like both platforms , NI Crio and IFI. As time goes on, NI will make learning easier and I hope to see this platform stay for years to come.

-rc

National Instruments and Wind River both deserve our gratitude for their support and sponsorship.

This thread, which I started, has taken some curious twists and turns.
I guess some people thought I was trying ignite a religious war to denigrate NI.
Your post looks like a perfect opportunity for me to set it straight.

I am new to FRC, my daughter just entered high school this year.
When I learned that FRC would be using a 32-bit PowerPC controller this year, I was thrilled.
When I learned that Wind River was providing Work Bench, I was ecstatic.

Please read my original post.
I don't think I asked for anybody to post that they hate Labview.
I just wanted to hear from teams that were using WRWB and maybe a few comments as to why.

FRC requires an enormous investment of time and energy -- for students and their parents.
I was trying to estimate the 'bang for the buck' on that investment.
I can teach my daughter to be a software engineer without FRC.

[Alexa Stott]

Team 25 used WindRiver for all our programming. It was a huge pain to set it up, but far less confusing than LabView. We had a friend from another team come and show us how to do a few things in LV. I've been a programmer for my team for the past 4 years, and I could barely make any sense of his "code."

A few gripes about WindRiver:
1. The setup is excruciatingly long, especially when using school-provided equipment.
2. The manual has more blank pages than useful ones.
3. WindRiver is "buggy" (not sure that's the right word). Some things like having to restart WV when it's not creating a .out file is really just irritating.

Overall, it's better than LabView, but it seems like someone took Eclipse, took away all its useful features, and sent it out to us.

[Mike AA]

One thing I am looking at better with Wind River than Labview, labview (which our robot is currently programmed in) takes a LONG time to build and load to the robot. I have heard wind river takes much less.

Now I have a question, after finding the default code "simple template" what window do I find the code I need to edit? I did code in C last year using the program we had (cant remember now) so I have a good grasp on the context. I loaded the simple template but only found about 20 lines of code in the top center frame but I dont see where any values?

-Mike AA

[Alexa Stott]

Originally Posted by Mike AA

One thing I am looking at better with Wind River than Labview, labview (which our robot is currently programmed in) takes a LONG time to build and load to the robot. I have heard wind river takes much less.

Now I have a question, after finding the default code "simple template" what window do I find the code I need to edit? I did code in C last year using the program we had (cant remember now) so I have a good grasp on the context. I loaded the simple template but only found about 20 lines of code in the top center frame but I dont see where any values?

-Mike AA

Could you be a bit more specific about what it is you're exactly looking for?

The SimpleTemplate simply gives you declarations for 2 joysticks and your drive motors using USB 1&2 and pwm 1&2, respectively. It also gives you a basic auto mode and joystick control in teleop (I believe tank drive, but don't quote me on that).

[gvarndell]

Originally Posted by xtreampb

this didn't help me at all. What i got from the wiki is that VI is a fancy text editor??? do you have any more links?

You asked what vi mode was.
I had assumed that you might be confused by 'vi', since it's also a Labview term.
My only goal was to help you understand that 'vi mode' has nothing to do with Labview 'virtual instruments'.

Why would someone feel strongly enough about a 'fancy text editor' that they would mention it as a feature (when there are so many other features to mention)?
I can only guess it's because, historically, GUI IDE software development tools have come with a bare minimum editor that simply didn't meet the needs of programmers.
If a coder has to go outside the GUI to edit his/her code, then the IDE is doomed.
I've been using Vi for 25 years, so the inclusion of a Vi mode made Workbench the first IDE I could use for a project life cycle -- design to debug to maintenance.

As for more links, try this one.
http://www.vim.org/download.php
Download VIM for windows and try it.

[DtD]

Our team opted to use C/C++ because our programmers were already fimilar with C++, and not LabView. However, the Windriver interface was EXTREMLY annoying, it caused tons of problems that ended up making our robot's code much less than it could've been. We wasted like 1 week on fighting Windriver, another 1 fighting the cRIO, and another 2 fighting the documentation.

~DtD

[Foda]

I'm not at all happy with WRW. I've found it using 500+MB (I have 2GB) of ram when just opening a small project. I can't even do anything because I constantly get "Out of Memory" errors. Our team has noticed similar problems with slow startup speeds. Visual C++ Intelisence is much better. The help manual is also not helpful at all (it starts a webserver through my browser?! what?!). We wish we could use VC++...