A good time based way to program

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Look at the updated documentation for 2012 WPILib. I think the command based robot is exactly what you are looking for.

[BradAMiller]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

Look at the updated documentation for 2012 WPILib. I think the command based robot is exactly what you are looking for.

I agree, and you can specify timeouts for commands. Look at the WPILib Cookbook and find the section on using timeouts. The stuff you're looking for is built in. It will only do the delay for a single command and everything else will keep running.

You might also check out the videos at http://youtube.com/user/bradamiller. It explains how to write the GearsBot sample program step by step.

Brad

[neal]

Thanks all for your suggestions. I'm trying to just stick with SimpleRobot for this year since I don't think we have enough time now to write it for CommandBased one, and to test, troubleshoot it.

Brad, does timeouts also work with SimpleRobot, I checked the cookbook and it only shows examples for the command-based bot.

[BradAMiller]

Originally Posted by neal

Thanks all for your suggestions. I'm trying to just stick with SimpleRobot for this year since I don't think we have enough time now to write it for CommandBased one, and to test, troubleshoot it.

Brad, does timeouts also work with SimpleRobot, I checked the cookbook and it only shows examples for the command-based bot.

Unfortunately it doesn't. You're correct that if you do a Timer.delay() it will stop the thread, and the rest of the program. If you want overlapped stuff happening then, as you suggested, you can use timers. Then you'll need a loop that checks if the time is up on the drive system while continuing to service the other subsystems. For trying to do a lot of overlapping operations I'd prefer to use the IterativeRobot base class. Then the looping is built in.

Brad

[neal]

Thanks!

We'll probably just use Command Based Robot. Just started writing it again and looking through the cookbook and GearsBot.