[apalrd]

I think there is no problem with LabVIEW autonomous. I used Autonomous Independent, and ran my own loops within it, and see no reason not to. I had a system like NXTG that gave me high-level controls to do feedback on speed while driving straight and finish by distance, etc. and blocks to set data for the other modules to pick up (kick distance, shift state, chassis mode, kick, ball-O-fier). It worked really well. I am already planning on next year.

I wrote some code for a fairly new team at Troy. We were playing against 469 and wanted to try a sacrificial robot. They had mecanums, and volunteered. So in like 10 minutes (using their Classmate) I wrote a simple time-based routine that used Mecanum-Cartesian and Delay And Feed, in a flat sequence structure, and it worked perfectly. They made it into the tunnel, and 469 did not. 469 was able to get in in the last 20 seconds and win the match, and that was enough to push us from #1 seed.

I also helped a team that we mentored last year, with some autonomous stuff before MSC. I told their programmer to use Autonomous Independent, and string together Tank Drives and Delay and Feed's, and connect their errors. Since data flows over the error line, LabVIEW executes the VI's sequentially and that's all you have to do. He was impressed as this was much easier then the Auto Iterative he had at Detroit, which didn't work.


There is one giant flaw in the system that causes autonomous development problems, especially on LabVIEW. Every time you build code, it has to re-build the entire WPI library. Then it re-downloads the whole WPI library. This is painfully slow, and for minor autonomous fixes between matches this is often a giant problem. Example: While sitting next to the field in elims, I had a minor kick distance change to make. During auto, I wrote in the new number, and begun the build. It did not finish the build until after the robot came back to the "pits" (this is in Atlanta), the tether cable had been connected, and the classmate was booting. Then, it finished downloading in only like 2 minutes. It would be nice if it was easier to partition the WPI lib so it dosen't have to rebuild, or separate the autonomous code.