Completely New to LabView & FIRST
 

Greetings! My name is MacKenzie Bates. I am on Avon Lake High School's 1st FIRST Robotics Club. I am in charge of programming, but have had no previous experience in LabView. I know HTML, CSS, Objective C, JavaScript, SQL and some of C# & C++. I have never worked with this graphical interface before. I understand the basic concepts, but am not sure how to accomplish the things that need to get done for our robot to properly function. It is basically me since no one else has had programming experience.

We have the car operate-able with a joystick so that is progress. We would like to have the camera operated by a joystick, be able to press a button to trigger a catapult that will throw a basketball, and press a button to lift the bridge. Really the bridge lift and catapult control are the major things two that have to work.

We have decided to sacrifice the autonomous mode so that the programming focus can be put on simply making the car controllable in the user-operation stage.

Any help on how we should go about accomplishing the three tasks would be great help.

MacKenzie

Re: Completely New to LabView & FIRST
 

You've got some big hardware feats ahead of you too (well, your teammates do).

Check out frcmastery.com for some useful video tutorials.

Also, TEAM358.org came in handy for my team's rookie year last year:
http://team358.org/files/programming...2009-/LabVIEW/
Specifically they show what you need to add to the 3 major VI files to get things working.

Have fun!

Re: Completely New to LabView & FIRST
 

If you have experience with C++, then why don't you use it? It's what we have used for the last few years.

Re: Completely New to LabView & FIRST
 

Don't rule it out completely! Just make it a "plan B" for when you finish the teleop programming. Watching the robot go by itself is really amazing, and it's not too hard to do something simple during autonomous, like pushing the bridge down and getting the balls on your side.

Good luck, and remember that the kit of parts website (www.usfirst.org/frc/kitofparts) is your friend! Especially the manual at the top of the "technical resources" page (so important that I didn't have to look up the addresses)

You say you've worked with several languages; what kind of programming have you done? Robotics programming is about infinite loops and doing something over and over, rather than something like a calculator where you just get something done and then wait for input again.

Re: Completely New to LabView & FIRST
 

I just wrote this video game in C# XNA:

http://games.itbmac.com/GoodBadgersGoneBad.html