Amatur Team

[Robby Unruh]

Being a rookie last year, and the only programmer on the team, really seemed kind of overwhelming. But just sitting down with the classmate and tinkering with the Default Code really calmed my nerves.

My advice to you would be to load up the default code, run it to the robot, and just drive it for a little while. Try to figure out what does what in the code. Doing this last year really opened up a whole new door for me this year, because I'm still the only programmer on the team, and am able to do a lot more now because of it.

This page's got a really helpful PDF file about programming in Java: http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/frcjava.html
And some really good team resources are out there as well, if you're willing to look for them.

[johncap100]

Where do you find the default code, you said under FRC examples but you never said where that was

thanks a bunch

Originally Posted by Robby Unruh

Being a rookie last year, and the only programmer on the team, really seemed kind of overwhelming. But just sitting down with the classmate and tinkering with the Default Code really calmed my nerves.

My advice to you would be to load up the default code, run it to the robot, and just drive it for a little while. Try to figure out what does what in the code. Doing this last year really opened up a whole new door for me this year, because I'm still the only programmer on the team, and am able to do a lot more now because of it.

This page's got a really helpful PDF file about programming in Java: http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/frcjava.html
And some really good team resources are out there as well, if you're willing to look for them.

[Robby Unruh]

When you start a new Java project, you will get a menu with folders, one of those folders will be named "FRC Examples". It will have multiple example code projects, such as the LineTracker demo, Targeting demo (leftover from last year's game), and some Default Code projects, SimpleRobot and IterativeRobot. I'd recommend SimpleRobot for first-year teams, because Iterative robot is a little more complicated. It's my team's second year and we still prefer SimpleRobot over Iterative.

[aaronweiss74]

Definitely take a look at the javadocs included with WPILibJ. They help quite a bit. As for any issues you may come across, go along with the usual principals such as isolating the problem, etc. And always remember to test changes, even if they seem minor. Changing one line of code might just break something. And on less of a programming level, don't feel hurt if/when your team blames you for a problem. It's generally not personal, and it happens a lot since it's apparently pretty easy to blame the code. If something goes wrong, you should look over your code just to make sure there's nothing wrong there, even if you're completely positive that everything you wrote is correct. And sometimes, you'll get someone insisting that you should check the code for problems when it's something remedial such as printing values from a sensor. At that point, just nod and pretend to look it over. If it's really something that can't be wrong, there's no sense wasting time fighting over it.

[Brian Ha]

Lol i would send you a message but they won't let me. Anyways it's kind of funny because there is also a team in michigan their name is the electro eagles and their number is 3536. You guys are 3650. I just find that kind of cool.

My 2 cents