Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

TI-89 basic is far better! One can actually type in code rather than selecting commands from menus.

Anyway, we switched from LabVIEW to Java and love it.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

Does anyone use Eclipse to code in java? And if so, how is it better/different from netbeans?

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

We Write our main robot code in C and do our Dash Board with Lab View

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

I use it for app development (still ironing out the details, only been at learning for a month or so), but we use Netbeans for our robot. Since I don't need to get into too many details so far for either one, the only thing I find is that Eclipse has a little bit more of a sleeker feel while Netbeans seems to have a bit more of an organized, structured feel when looking through the classes, commands and subsystems.

I suppose for me it's aesthetics that are pretty similar, but since I don't use both for robots, I'd take my statement with a grain of salt.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

We use Eclipse. I am not one of the programmers, but I think that they use it because most of them already have it and they have a repository setup with it.

-Mihir Iyer

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

Java. We all know it and it's simple and clean.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

Bingo.

If I jumped into C++, ignored classes, subroutines, and just tried to write everything out line-by-line, it would be ugly.

Just because you don't understand or haven't been taught how to write clean LabView code doesn't mean it isn't clean.

One basic rule: If your code gets bigger than one or two screen-widths, you're getting too complicated and not splitting it up into Sub-VI's efficiently.

There's a whole host of other rules, but being that this is a Visual language, if you can't tell from a glance what it's doing, you're probably doing it wrong.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

Teams and CSA have been entering software data in the NI Parkway system. As of right now, there are 414 teams that have entered data. 42.5% LabVIEW, 37.4% Java, and 20% C++. See http://www.niparkway.com/frcts/reports

You can enter your data by going to http://niparkway.com, click on help out, choose an event that you are competing at, and then choosing your team.


330 is using Java for the robot, and LabVIEW for the dashboard / vision processing.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

I recommend Java as the language to start with in FRC not only because it is the mandated language for the College Board AP Computer Science Class, but most first semester Algorithmic Design courses at major universities start students off with Java.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

This. A lot of teams start out in labview, but don't learn any good practices or put any thought into organization. Then they get bigger and start coding more advanced features, but still have the same coding practices. It just ends up a mess.

That was my team last year, big and complicated code with no thought to organization. We ended up moving to c++ for other reasons, but some of it was making a clean break; allowing our programming team to break out of their bad habits and start thinking about organization.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

We are using LABView. But we are also using library's and sub-directories to maintain organization. We currently have a library for each 'component' of the robot stored in its own sub-directory.

Chassis
Shooter
Climbing
Hanging
Intake
User Interface
File IO
Test

Each library is organized in the same manner:
<Library>Open.vi - called from Begin.vi
<Library>Close.vi - called from Finish.vi
<Library>Disable.vi - called from Disable.vi
<Library>ControlLoop.vi - called from Periodic Tasks.vi

Then there are <Library>"specific".vi's for library specific actions.

In addition, we are using the "Conditional Disable Symbol" to allow us to selectively include/exclude portions of the code depending on what we are looking to do. For example: our practice bot does not have any physical Intake or Hanging components, so they are disabled. No code related to the Intake or Hanging will execute and no errors are generated because the physical devices are not present.

And the code can be as clean as you want it to be. See attached screen shot.

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

The code I saw was incredibly complicated due to it being for some piece of random hardware. It was pretty messy. But you are correct, it does depend on the programmer and his/her practices. Our code is definitely a mess because nobody bothers to take the time to write it cleanly or clean it up after build season. Splitting projects into Sub-VIs (much like splitting a C++ project into different source and header files) would make things much neater. I think LabVIEW would be a nice thing to know, but I don't see myself using it for something as relatively simple as the robot code.

Alex Brinister

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

On team 842 we used to use Labview for our FRC robot but this year we switched to Java. For our autonomous underwater robot though, we use C# with Visual Studio.

C# >= Java

Re: Which programming language does your team use?
 

We have used LabView since 2009, but we switched to C++ this year since our lead programmer is more proficient in C++. All of our vision code is also written in C++. #cppforlife

Lol C#. System.IO.FRC.Robot.Controls.NI.CRIO.Motors.Talon. Commands.Speed.CIM.SetPWM()