Hi, I’m the mentor of #5241, a team that hasn’t competed in FRC for about 5 years now. We’re looking to maybe get back into FRC in the next couple of years if funding and participation continue their upward trend, and the current students I have would like to use the old FRC parts to practice building a FRC-like robot to prepare for the future, maybe build a t-shirt cannon robot (which I think is a requirement for FRC teams now). We’d like to use the RoboRIO and control systems and follow all of the setup and tutorials available, but we don’t have an active license for NI since we aren’t an active team. Are we just out of luck until we register for an FRC season? It seems a waste to have all of these components and not be bale to to do anything with them, and we’re not in a position financially yet to register for the season.
The driver station software doesn’t need a license key despite the installer asking for it, so you should be fine with that. You’re probably out of luck if you want to use LabVIEW, but this also could be a good opportunity to learn something else since it’s a relatively low-stakes environment.
Good luck and welcome back!
Thanks! Good to hear we don’t need to key!
In addition to not needing the key, depending on the other components you still have, you can drive many PWM motor controllers in FIRST from an Arduino or similar Microcontroller. It wouldn’t be good practice though for a real robot, but does give you a way to make a T-Shirt cannon if the RoboRio fails on you. Depending on when your team returns, they may be learning about a new Robot Controller in 2027 that replaces the RoboRio.
We don’t use our LabView license so if you are a LabView team and need it please DM me and I can send it along Tuesday
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