Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Mahar
How close is the new library to existing WPILib? I want to get my team up and running as soon as possible and I was wondering if it is worth it to learn the old WPILib on the old controller?
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The new WPILib represents the same level of abstraction as the old library. By that I mean that there are methods to run motors, get sensor values, and interact with the driver station. The philosophy has been to stop short of providing code to do the "trick" that is required in any competition, but to make sure the pieces are there so that it's fairly straightforward for a team to do it. For example, there was never any code to drive a robot to a green target, but you could always get the position of the target, and you could always drive the robot. The complete program to follow someone walking around with a green light was less than 20 lines of code.
In other words, using the old WPILib will give you and your team a feel for how to write robot programs with the new library. But the new library will be much more capable and the interfaces much richer than ever before.
And besides all that, the source code will be available along with extensive documentation to make the transition as smooth as possible. We are very sensitive to the fact that a lot of new stuff is getting rolled out at the same time and FIRST is trying to make this as easy as possible.
Brad