Next Year's code
 

I was confused at nationals, they said that they were going to have available C++, and Lab View (I think was the name) as languages, does this mean C won't be in use? Also second question for Lab View were can you find tutorials on it??

Re: Next Year's code
 

http://decibel.ni.com/content/community/first try looking there

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...or just Google LabView. It's very well documented and known.

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They made it pretty clear that it would be C or C++ when describing the new controller.

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C++ is a super-set of C, so you cound use plain C. This doesn't mean your existing robot control code will run, since it will be a different platform, but any of the purly algorithm code will still work.

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Is there any suggestions on what code I do use?

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If you're comfortable using C, I would strongly recommend C++. C++ just adds features such as objects and templates to C. If you are familiar with C syntax, picking up C++ should be fairly easy.

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I'm really eager to get my hands on some of the default code for the new controller. I'd like to see how its communicating with these modules and initializing them. I'm excited to see that it is multi-lingual (even thought I was hoping we could use python :) ) however I’m a bit disappointed. My team's programming mentor and myself are opposed to using labview. We kind of feel like we are going to be forced to use it because while yes you can probably do everything in c or c++ that you can do in labview, you know that they are going to make it easier for you to do it in labview (like programming the vision system). I don't know how much support or tutorials NI will provide for teams who do choose to program their robot in c or c++ and if they chose not to use labview they will be left to fend for themselves. Either way I think that the Chief Delphi community will be a huge help to teams that chose to not use labview. Plus, I had some discussion with my team and we talked about how the c code could be executed from lab view. Therefore you could write your code in c/c++, have lab view do the vision processing, then write a flag with what it sees to a global, where then labview would execute your c/c++ code as a module. You could get the best of both worlds and your actual c/c++ code would be what’s making the decisions for the bot.

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The SW engineers at NI know LV, but they are first and foremost C/C++ programmers. So, while we may encourage you to give LV a try from time to time, we also know C/C++ and when we say we are going to have parity in the libraries, we mean it. The vision libraries will be exposed through both a C interface and a LV interface.

As for documentation and tutorials for C/C++, that is the role that WPI is playing on this team.

Greg McKaskle

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Seeing the new controller is programmed with WPILIB I would suggest tinkering with the existing version for the current controller. After speaking with Brad he said everything available in Lab View should be available in C/C++.

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Although I have not used Labview, I have used a similiar product Matlab and it's associated program, Simulink, for the past four years on the GM Hybrid Program.
We used this platform to create the 2008 Model Year software for the recently released GMC Tahoe and Chevrolet Silverado. Simulink is a graphical based programming environment similar to Labview developed by Mathworks.

For those of you who have only used C/C++ environment, you will be missing out on all of the advantages of a graphical environment, most importantly the ability to debug your software on your desktop. You should be able to create
simple input functions that exercise your code and watch the output's respond.
Believe me, that functionality alone will quickly entice teams to make the switch from text based programming to graphical programming. :D

I am not certain what direction CD47 will go at this point. It appears that FIRST is leading us in the direction of Labview
while maintaining a legacy C-based environment.

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That is absolutely awesome Greg, and is probably my biggest "worry". If the libraries are equal, then that is just about everything everyone in FIRST could ask for - 3 different programming languages with 2 different IDE's is far more than we have today.

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So then Lab View is basically in C language, but with the addition of a graphical enviroment to test that programming on?

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No. LabView is not a GUI for C. It is a graphical programming language. I have no simple way to describe it besides that. If it doesn't help you understand, I think you'll have to try it out for yourself.

And you can try it out for yourself. Every FRC team has a copy.

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You may also download labview from ni's first community website for a 30-day trial. I plan to take this trial and figure out what workshops should be made for our students in the Fall.

All I have to say is, I spent only an hour after install on it last night and I was able to create the in's and out's of our skid drive into the VI. All that's left is to put in the neutral zones we have and then test/tweak. Timewise YMMV, but this little bit was very easy to do. What I can't seem to remember is where the "custom script" box is so I can plug in our proportional control algorithm...

I plan to try to do this for a driver-centric mecanum drive by the end of the trial using (finally!) proper unit vectors, but who knows how successful the testing will be. This would also be possible to code in C/C++, but the "testing" would consist of console outputs whereas in LabView I can easily have graphs and meters for visual history.