FIRST Robotics FRC - LabVIEW design pattern

[Ian_Ren]

Can someone share his/her experience in the design pattern used in the FIRST Robotics FRC competition? Will the "producer-consumer" structure work on CRIO with LabVIEW real-time? or are there any advantages of teaching kids the design patterns (knowing we have only six and a half weeks to complete the project)? I have been using LabVIEW at work for a while, but never used CRIO and LabVIEW realtime. This year is my first year of being a mentor of a local high school robotics team. Thanks for your help.

[Julianne_K]

Hi Ian, 

In LabVIEW Real-Time, the producer-consumer structure is useful if you are trying to pass data from a high-speed, deterministic loop to a slow loop (i.e. one that is writing the data to a file). However, the design pattern is slightly different in Real-Time, as you will want to use FIFOs to transfer the data instead of queues. This design pattern may or may not be advantageous depending on your application. More information on this design pattern can be found here.