What base class do you use when programming?

[E Dawg]

What base class do you use when programming and why?

[madhav]

Simple robot for life

[JohnFogarty]

Iterative Robot based for life. Actually I'm moving to command based this year.

[Oblarg]

Last year we used iterative robot, because finite state machines are very easy to write and we didn't want to deal with concurrency.

We may look at multithreading this year.

[madhav]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

We may look at multithreading this year.

We might try multithreading as well. But we want to shy away from CommandBased and try to write our own.

[Jared Russell]

java.lang.Object

[Poseidon5817]

Simple Robot, considering moving to Iterative Robot.

[madhav]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

java.lang.Object

I second this

[Kingland093]

We use simple because it's well… simple.
One of our programmers briefly experimented with iterative

[Bryce Paputa]

I'm not going to say that they're wrong, but anyone not using command based should seriously consider it. It does make some simple things more complicated, but greatly helps readability and maintainability, and it makes chaining actions together and responding to inputs very easy.

[nathanwalters]

IterativeRobot. What it lacks in simplicity it makes up for in flexibility.

[wmarshall11]

Originally Posted by Bryce Paputa

I'm not going to say that they're wrong, but anyone not using command based should seriously consider it. It does make some simple things more complicated, but greatly helps readability and maintainability, and it makes chaining actions together and responding to inputs very easy.

Having spent serious time and energy trying to make complex actions work safely with SimpleRobot, switching to CommandBased was probably the best programming decision 11 ever made. Not having logic sprinkled through all levels of your code is the best thing ever.

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by wmarshall11

Having spent serious time and energy trying to make complex actions work safely with SimpleRobot, switching to CommandBased was probably the best programming decision 11 ever made. Not having logic sprinkled through all levels of your code is the best thing ever.

We switched to Java 2 seasons ago and went straight for the Command Based structure, and we have been all aboard ever since. As a professional Java developer and ex-CS teacher I feel it teaches excellent practices and is pretty simple to pick up as a beginner.

[EricS-Team180]

In 2013 and 2014, we used Brad Miller's Robot Builder to create a Command based structure in C++. I agree with the comments of Bryce Paputa, wmarshall11, and notmattlythgoe on the Command based approach.
Plus, I like Brad's "pictures-to-code". It introduces the students to the practice used extensively in my field of aero gas turbine controls - and elsewhere.
We'll use it, again, in 2015.

Prior to that we used the Iterative Robot framework, for the same reasons nathanwalters posted.

Eric

[Cel Skeggs]

We implement IgneousApplication.
More specifically, we use our team's event-based robot framework (the CCRE), which we think is nicer than the command-based framework because it gives us lots of useful tools without forcing a specific structure in the way that command-based does.
Also, event-based control seems to be a better option to program robots than cycle-based control or thread-based control, as far as I can tell. (Though we occasionally still use those in the places where they are helpful.)