Issue Mass Compiling FRC Robot Project

[Larry Lewis]

I was recently working on some robot code in LabVIEW and went to mass compile the project out of habit due to my LabVIEW training and good project practice. After doing so not only did my project crash but the whole WPI robotics library seemed to be mis-linked which lead to the inability to create a new robot project. I even tried to relink the VIs but I was unsuccessful due to the amount of VIs that would have to be relinked.

I am not sure if this occurance specific to this computer installation or not. Did anyone else out there have similar experience?

I guess at the end of the day be careful with the mass compile of the robot project code due to mis-linking/relinking of the VIs.

[Greg McKaskle]

I don't know if this has already been reported through the official bug reporting channels, but it would be good to get to the bottom of that.

Like you, I tend to think of mass compile as innocuous, but with RT, it isn't really a good thing. Remember that the PC you are working on is Intel, but the robot will be PPC. WPI Lib could technically be used on either one, so when you mass compile, one thing that happens is to overwrite the PPC binary cached in each VI with Intel binary. Not a huge deal, certainly shouldn't cause any crash, but not going to help with compile time either.

AWhat seemed to cross-link? If I remember right, it seemed like there were a few things in WPI libraries which weren't in the palettes, and were already deprecated (the API evolved quite a bit during beta). Normally you wouldn't even use those, and I'm not sure if they even compile anymore. Anyway, perhaps those are contributing.

For the release we use a tool that does a programmatic mass compile specifically for the cRIO-RT app type. So, I'm pretty sure you could do that, but again is shouldn't be necessary unless you are using the VI server a lot.

Greg McKaskle

[Larry Lewis]

Greg,
Thanks for getting back to me on this and your explanation. I haven't dealt too much with RT deployment mostly just windows and PXI platforms. The FPGA library's seemed to be the ones that were linked incorrectly. I kept on getting multiple files to select from to relink. I wish I could take a screen shot but it wasn't on my PC. I guess going forward I will just be aware of it. Thanks!