I haven’t found much about this but does anyone know why the web interface is still using Microsoft Silverlight? It has long been deprecated and there are much better solutions for it. Also a huge let down for teams using Linux. Are there any plans to replace it with something more modern?
UPDATE: Just realized there isn’t even a Silverlight plugin for Microsoft Edge. I hope something is being done about this.
Supposedly, the 2018 beta even still uses Silverlight. You will unfortunately have to use Internet Explorer to use the web interface. I suspect NI may have given up on an HTML5 interface for the RoboRIO since a new system is coming in 2020. Of course, a Silverlight interface was inexcusable even in 2015.
The Silverlight interface is a standard across NI’s RIO devices since at least 2013 (and I suspect other families of devices), so I don’t think it’s being changed any time soon. Ideally you shouldn’t need to touch the interface too often.
Interesting perspective… but it doesn’t eliminate the problem. You do need to be capable of connecting to it at a competition as we have often been required to bring up that roboRIO page during inspection to validate various firmware levels and other settings. This means that you need to be prepared ahead of time to ensure that you have a system with the Silverlight interface functioning.
This should have not been necessary last year, as all items on the inspection checklist can be verified from the driver station. In earlier years, it was necessary to use the web interface to check the roborio firmware version.
The Rio’s web interface is still the easiest way to update firmware on the canbus stuff. The talon firmware rev will not show up on the DS if you have talons with different firmwares on them.
Be happy though. I have have industrial bits that run Javascript for their web interface. You have to guess which version of Javascript they are running because the different versions are incompatible with each other. Your browser has to have the correct version along with all of its security holes to talk the web interface. One of my favorite things to do is to harass the salesman when they tout how nifty their web interface is.
A) I disagree - the Hero is the easiest but I’m not sure it’s great for FRC teams.
B) You sure you don’t mean Java since for the most part browsers only run the version of JS they ship with and, for the most part the later versions of JS are all backwards compatible. (ES5 code will run in ES2017 environments) So… I’m confused.
A) On an FRC robot an browser with siverlight would seem to be simpler since you would need to connect the Hero to the canbus. The Hero looks neat though. It is on my wish list.
B) I guess I really mean Java applets on the device’s webpage. An up to date browser doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. I have tried to connect to them in a while. So it would be Java on the browser. I do confuse javascript and Java. I do know that they are different.
I’m by no means in favor of the silverlight interface, but instead I’m saying that NI has this interface as a standard for most devices (the myRIO uses the same interface, and it was released in 2013. I can’t speak for devices outside the RIO architecture, though). For this reason I wouldn’t expect NI to change it for the RoboRIO specifically, since teams have to use windows to image the RIO/use the DS anyway so they should have access to IE (NI software is the only software in FRC that dead-set requires windows).
Asking NI to develop a whole new web interface for 1 specific device to save a minor inconvenience is not something I would bank on. It is something I’d like, but not something I expect.
Also, if you don’t want to use IE/Silverlight, you can use NI-MAX to access all of the functionality of the Web UI without actually using the Web UI. The interface is very similar and it is also standard across most of NI’s device fleet.
NI-MAX should be installed along with a labview installation. I believe you can also get a download link for it ~somewhere~
At least last year, our inspector had us verify that our SRXs had new enough firmware, which did necessitate the use of the (silverlight) web UI.
Talon SRX firmware verification is required on the inspection checklist. However, the driver station shows Talon SRX firmware versions, so it isn’t necessary to use the web UI (unless as Frank said), you have different firmware versions on different Talons.
I believe that in the end, the answer to this question is “because it still works”. I know at my plant we are still running applications written in Basic on MSDOS machines because it does what we need it to do. Why bother throwing resources at something that still works: especially when your resources are very limited. You can still download older versions of firefox and install silverlight - that is what we did for beta. I keep a portable version of firefox on my keychain flash drive just for this purpose.
You can download NI System Configuration (including NI MAX) here:
I had that one crop up at an event I was inspecting at. The driver station flagged as “multiple” or “undefined”, I forget which.
After a CSA dropped by they all had the most recent version.
Note you will also require the RoboRIO Driver (part of the CompactRIO Drivers), which is a pretty hefty installation but it should already exist if you have installed LabVIEW.
As pointed out by others, there are numerous ways to access info and configure the RIO devices. Most industrial NI customers will use MAX today, and the expectation is that they will use SystemLink - a SALT-based tool in the near future.
The web server configuration tool was envisioned as a light-weight alternative, and it is, except that like many things on the web it had the rug pulled from beneath it. I had to do ITAR training the other day and tried five browsers on two different OSes before finding one with flash. Yes, … flash.
Anyway, the SilverLight platform was never my favorite, but it was selected by the folks doing the client many years ago. Your Windows laptop still has IE, even though they hide it and promote Edge. So if you search for IE, you will find it, and it will work. That being said, you should be able to do almost all inspection work with the DS, and you can use Hero for CAN config, …, or IE.
I wish I could confirm that a new client was being built, but the priorities are on SystemLink for industry.
Greg McKaskle
So I get to make this statement because I work for another company that failed miserably* to predict the death of proprietary web frameworks… if you think the death of Flash and Silverlight is “having the rug pulled from beneath” you then you weren’t paying attention to the birth of the smartphone and where Javascript and HTML were going.
Flash and Silverlight both died a long time ago. The rug wasn’t pulled instantly. It was tugged on slowly over far too long of a time period.
*VMware is paying the price big time with customer sentiment towards our Web UIs only now starting to turn for the better. I love our products but man, we made some customers angry.
Not sure exactly where this is going, but I guess we are just throwing opinions about.
As you said, the Silverlight era was over quite some time ago, and while I was not the person to endorse going with SL, I was involved from a dev team perspective. There was a rug, it was yanked, and it hurt - then and still. We are expected to maintain a product with an embedded browser, with lots of SL content on several platforms, and MS changed its tune very quickly. Call it what you want, but going from heavy tool investment to EOL maintenance of your primary technology before your product is even released is a bummer.
We are just finishing an IOT/net appliance academic product, and trying to get reasonable support across browsers, getting high performance and good security, often requires picking from unratified web technologies and hoping they will still be around in five years. The IT department at universities doesn’t have an easy job, and their policies are constantly changing. Again, rugs, yanking, and bummer when you don’t pick correctly.
Back to the topic. NI is making nothing new with SL, but we are stuck with a some stuff from that era. This is perhaps just another lesson about technology. Today’s cutting edge tech will wind up in tomorrow’s junk bin. That is kinda what we get paid to do.
Greg McKaskle