[Greg McKaskle]

VI stands for Virtual Instrument. LabVIEW stands for Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench. These names are better left as acronyms today, but act as reminders of when LabVIEW was primarily used to build SW UIs for lab instruments.

To build a tank drive robot, I'd start by building the robot project and opening up the TeleOp VI from the project. I'd also open the Tank Drive Example project by going to View>>Getting Started. On the Getting Started window, click on Examples in the lower right. This will bring up a list of LV example projects which are very useful for seeing FRC specific LV code as well as for running the code, playing with parameters to fit it to your robot or test bench, and verifying that items work as expected. Note that you will need to set the IP address of the cRIO by right clicking on the properties of the target.

The example simplifies things by smashing the entire framework into a single VI, but looking at the Drive specific portions, pay attention to the fact that there are two joysticks being opened instead of one. In the framework, the joysticks are being opened and stored in the Begin VI. Next notice that there are calls to retrieve the axis from the joysticks -- similar to the original project. Finally, notice that the Arcade Drive VI was replaced with a Tank Drive.

If you find this too dense, ask more detailed questions.

If you have an error message saying that a VI is missing, please pay attention to the VI name. If the VI name is something that you wrote, it may be necessary to show LV where the VI is. This is normally caused by moving a LV project or source around but not moving all of the source, or by changing the relative paths.

Greg McKaskle