[ProgrammerMatt]

Originally Posted by lineskier

I assume you're trying to score the 5 points for driving forward. We helped one of our alliance partners at week zero do this. Now it may vary a bit if your using simplerobot or iterative robot, but the approach is the same regardless. When your autonomous starts, store the current time. Then on each loop of autonomous check to see if the time is > 5 seconds. If it is stop the drive, otherwise drive forward slow.

private long startTime = 0;

//the first time autonomous executes (i.e. autonomous init)
startTime = System.currentTimeMills();

//on each loop/iteration
if(System.currentTimeMills() - startTime < 5000){
      //drive forward slow (.1 or .2 for a start)
}else{
      //stop the drive
}

Why not do something like this:

in autonomous function:

drive.tankDrive(0.5,0.5); //set drive motors to 50%
Timer.delay(time); //time to wait in seconds
drive.tankDrive(0.0,0.0); //stop drive motors

Because public void autonomous() {} only runs once there's no need for a loop it will simply execute in order.