[Tom Bottiglieri]

I think your answer lies in the complexity of your robot. If you are just mapping motors to joystick values and switches (open loop), you should be able to design the code and implement it fairly easily at the regional.

If you are doing any kind of semi autonomous operation or closed loop control, you should probably look into setting up some kind of test bench with another cRIO, or figuring out a way to make some community tools useful. (Like the Kwarqs' virtual robot or 111's virtual driver station)

Also, if you are new(ish) to programming, it may be helpful to do some test coding on a previous year's robot. While the control system isnt the same, many of the coding techniques you will use will be the same. For example, I have been using the same state machine code for arms/shooters/turrets/launchers for the past 3 years. (Don't worry, we rewrote it every year. Its just basically the same exact thing.)