[Doug Leppard]

John and Alex,

I cut my teeth on the same things as you did. So I know where you are coming from.

As a team we use EasyC Pro. Some will say you must use MPLAB as our team has done years before. But last year we did EasyC Pro and it takes the pain out of programming and provides what you need. Has an environment that allows kids to program. We programmed the VEX machines to work out the problems and then moved the code and concepts to the big robots.

Our team did well last year, voted in CD having best autonomous mode and made it to Einstein (if you are new that means we went to the Atlanta Championships and were one of the final 12 robots in the competition). I only say that because some look down on EasyC Pro but it lets us proto type quickly and we got results. It has a lot of built in stuff, like encoders etc and other routines that you don’t have to worry about doing and just do the core that you need to do for your team.

I would definitely look into it.