So, the current status of our project is... complete! I'll divide this post up into what worked and what didn't.
What Worked:
- Java runs on our cRIO. This is Java in the J2ME sense. We support the same things Squawk supports on other platforms, except possibly networking.
- Brad Miller from WPI was kind enough to loan us a demo robot, which we can control from Java. This gave us a great end to our presentation, when we drove the robot around in real time with a stuffed Duke. To quote Paul on this one: "I, for one, welcome our new Java-robot overlords." Despite being a popular internet thing, it was still pretty funny.
What Didn't Work:
- Debugging. You can debug with System.out.println(). Or, you can make the networking things compile, and it might just work.
- The serial port. If you're writing code that cares about the serial port, you are clearly capable of writing C++ code. Use the existing C++ class, or write a Java wrapper and share.
So that concludes the hard part of our project. Now we get to write a report.
Really cool stuff! We'd appreciate a how to and relevant files if that's possible in the near future? Thanks, and FIRST Robotics Teams everywhere may well find this useful. Labview < Java :)
ReplyDeleteI know this is years after this was written and you probably won't see it, but was this project done for FIRST and did it become wpilibj? It was very interesting reading it.
ReplyDeleteThanks,
Ben (FRC Team 2084)