[ksanger]

I joined Mak211 last year, three weeks before the ship date. The night before we had crashed our kicker as members had removed parts to modify without telling me. Kick, (too far), bend the forward bracket and eliminated the encoder so the return to reload the kick went back (too far) and destroyed the sensor telling it to stop. The morning of shipping we rebuilt the kicker.

But the most difficult part was that our position sensors on our four wheel steering kept coming loose. Plus we had no means of adjusting the wheels to a known starting position. After shipping we used a spare Crio to figure out how to make a Can Jaguar go from position control to speed control so we could rotate the wheels while reading the pots and displaying their position on the Dashboard. (Last year we were using C++ and to reconfigure the Cans we needed to destruct them then initialize them in either diagnostic speed mode or run position mode). I don't know if I can destruct them in Java and haven't seen a Java example that enables position mode.

Did I mention that I've never coded for C++ objects before? I have been using C since 1980, and I've only read about C++ before and I don't code for a living. Its amazing that we're teaching students Java for next year. Objects rule. Its going to be a while before I'm confident enough to write my own though. Maybe if I had the source I could modify that, but I haven't found the Java wpilibj source.