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Unread 26-02-2014, 18:01
Jefferson Jefferson is offline
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AKA: Jeff Clements
FRC #0016 (Bomb Squad)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Jan 2011
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Mountain Home, AR
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Re: Impressions: Command Based Robot

Quote:
Originally Posted by DjScribbles View Post
So, this year I decided to climb out of my familiar cave and try something new with our robot coding by switching to the (C++) Command Based pattern (this decision was helped by the great presentation from Brad Miller at CMP last year), rather than using my usual home-brewed iterative robot (still C++).

[snip]

I think next season (assuming I am still with my team), I am certainly going to use RobotBuilder, SmartDashboard, and LiveWindow, however I don't know if I'm a fan of the Command system as a universal pattern, it certainly works great for special modes and cases, but for general robot operation it seems like it overcomplicates things; and in autonomous, simple sequences are very easy to build, however the command structure starts to feel burdensome when we begin trying to coordinate multiple actions to be time efficient.
This is exactly how I felt last year and why we didn't build the robot around commands this year. Thanks for making the post I meant to make all off-season.
I really like RobotBuilder as a tool and have used it extensively since beta testing last year. I've come to appreciate the structure it builds. In fact, I start all my rookie programming sessions with it and every student who shows a mild interest in programming.
Our commands this year are limited to a few items we need to do infrequently. I don't see us going back to commands unless a student shows a very strong interest.