Virtual Devices

[matthewgkerr]

In a past life I worked with PLC's where the development tools provided virtual targets. This allowed me to test my program without the need of the physical target. Our team is currently bottle necked because there is one laptop being used to develop the program. Additionally, each minor change is being tested by uploading to the cRIO. This is painfully slow and means that there is only one student who is driving the development. What I would like to do is have multiple students working on the project (or at least working through tutorials or looking at the current program) and testing using virtual targets. Does the FRC LabView support virtual targets and are there any tutorials on how to do this? Thanks in advance.

Oh and on a side note, is anyone finding LabView to be very slow for various taks; such as starting LabView (several minutes)?

[Kevin_F]

Hey Matthew,

It is only possible to test one piece of code at a time with a single cRIO. That being said you can have multiple computers will multiple projects all targeting the same cRIO and students can all be working on it at the same time - only one of them can actually have the code running on the cRIO at a time though.  As for the speed issue - if you are running it on the classmate it will be pretty slow but on any normal powered laptop or desktop it should be pretty snappy. The minimum system requirements can be found here:http://www.ni.com/labview/requirements/.