watzmann: what kind of programming do you excel at? Do you prefer emdedded / low level code or high level / gui work? How many of the 4 of you are programmers?
If this is a uni project, you might be better off not trying to reinvent the wheel, as it is a lot of work to produce 1/2 the result you would get with emc. Also the code you produce has very few real world applications (simply because there are so many machine controllers of various states of development).
Now from my experience of uni projects, you would be better off marks wise if you took emc, and worked on writing a more intuitive GUI / adding some more advanced features to the existing code. You benefit from showing a system that is genuinely better then everything out there (as no one else has your enhancements), you can contribute to a large opensource project, and it would be easy to do some user tests with your software vs vanilla EMC to prove your systems superiority.
The other benefit is that you are not dependant on the hardware working well to get your grade, as the software could be demonstated independently should something go wrong with the project. (and vice verca for the hardware guys).  |