Where to start?

[DN1LE]

We are a rookie team with no programming experience. We have followed the Getting Started with the 2015 Control System. We have successfully ran the Benchtop Test Program for LabView. We are having a hard time grasping where to start modifying code. Any advice or help would be appreciated.

[Alan Anderson]

Start with Tutorial 4 - Developing a Robot Project and Tutorial 5 - Editing Team Code VIs.

[Skyehawk]

Hello and welcome to the magnificent forum that is Chief Delphi.
I agree the first time you look at labview it can be VERY confusing, but you must remember, it follows the same rules and concepts of text based languages, it may be easy to get lost, but you can get almost anything to work if you follow a few simple steps.

1) "Get your feet wet, ask questions later." Simply put this means go ahead and fool around with labview and see what you can figure out on your own. Programming is a very large subject and you will not learn everything by asking questions.
2) FIRST supplies example code. Not only is this code extremely nice for demonstrations, but it can be easily integrated into your project. You just need to know where to put the various parts of the example.
3) A fresh roboRIO project is a working project. It may only give you a basic arcade drivetrain, but it includes all of the support code, and has plenty of comments for you to read and figure out what goes where.
4) Don't be afraid to ask questions, everyone thinks differently and sometimes what may be obvious to some is out of reach of others. Chief Delphi is a great community and will answer your questions in a relatively quick manner; provided you fully explain the problem, attach screenshots, etc.

Good luck with your programming endeavors.

[DN1LE]

I've been reading and following the tutorials and messing with the default project. If a piece a code is put together I can follow what it is doing. However I am struggling with programming joystick buttons. There are plenty of previous code examples, with Unbundle by Name. The array example in the 2014 to 2015 Porting Guide is not helping. Just to understand how it works, any code examples of pushing a button to activate an output?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by DN1LE

...I am struggling with programming joystick buttons. There are plenty of previous code examples, with Unbundle by Name.

The FRC Examples that loaded with LabVIEW for FRC 2015 show array indexing for the Joystick values. What examples are you looking at?

...any code examples of pushing a button to activate an output?

What kind of output do you want to activate?

[mshafer1]

Originally Posted by DN1LE

The array example in the 2014 to 2015 Porting Guide is not helping. Just to understand how it works, any code examples of pushing a button to activate an output?

I am attaching a snippet (LabVIEW created picture that can be put back in LabVIEW to turn back into code). In the past, the buttons were in a cluster that could be unbundled, but now they are in an array. In text based languages, one gets a particular part of an array by placing an index in square brackets. The LabVIEW equivelant is the index array vi, which takes an array and the index you want. In this example, I have indexed button 0 (the trigger on most joysticks) and 3 (just a random other option) to resize the index vi to get more or fewer hover over it until the blue squares appear, then click and drag the bottom one.

[DN1LE]

Thanks to everyone for their input. Not sure what I was thinking on the buttons, I just needed to take a step farther. Sometimes the simplest things can trip you up....