Ever since April, when the announcement was made that FIRST Robotics Competition teams would be using a different robot controller and somewhat of a different programming environment, I've been anxious to try it out. FIRST announced that we would be using either LabVIEW from National Instruments, or the Wind River Workbench to program in C++. Me, being a little "old-school" and a bit anti-proprietary when it comes to developing software, I've been anxious to give the Wind River Workbench a whirl.
First of all, Wind River Workbench is a development environment based on the Eclipse platform. Eclipse is what our team used last year (with the appropriate toolchains) and I became quite fond of that environment. What I didn't know was if Wind River integrated somehow into your existing version of Eclipse, and if it did I wanted to work through all the problems before the FIRST kick-off in January. Hooking up Eclipse for FRC was a little tricky last year.
The good people at Wind River allow you to download a trial version of Workbench, after you fill out a form about a mile long and agree to give them your first born child. After all that, they'll let you use the software for 30 days! Yippee! So, I figured I could probably fudge a second download in 30 days and that would probably buy me enough time to sort out all the details before January.
This evening I proceeded to download the 637 MB file and install Workbench on my desktop computer. It took a while to download (through my cable modem) and it took another good chunk of time to install it, but when it was done, it was all completely configured. It may have helped that I already had other instances of Eclipse and CygWin on my computer, but everything just worked. I was amazed! Installing the Workbench gave me another version of Eclipse (specifically tailored to Workbench) and everything else that it needed was automatically installed.
Just before writing out this post I sat back down with Workbench; created a native application and just poked in the standard "Hello World" stuff; and it worked. Just like that. My code ran and I could run the debugger on it; it was painless.
I am very impressed. I am also ready to get my hands on the new WPILib. If you haven't seen the doxygen output yet, you can see it here.
The next season of FIRST will give us all lots of new challenges, and I'm very excited and ready. I can't wait for kick-off!
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