Programming team infrastructure

[Greg McKaskle]

For #1, I think what you are asking is "How do I add VIs so that they show up in the palette, similar to WPILib?"

First, write your VIs. Test them and drag them from the project window to see that you are happy with how they work, both top-level, and as subVIs.

To add them to the palette, the simplest is to put the folder into the user.lib directory. The icon and name from the VI will be used to create the palette, hovering over will show the documentation for the subVI. For basic hierarchy of functions, put them into folders within user.lib. If you'd like to get fancier, you can edit the presentation within the palettes using the Palette Editor. The palette editor is accessible from the Tools menu>>Advanced>>Edit Palette Set. By the way, when you update the folder, it may not show up in the palettes right away. To update the palette cache, you can either restart LV or open the Palette Editor and Cancel.

The Palette Editor hides your document windows temporarily and pins up one or more palette windows. You can navigate the palettes more or less normally, but you can use right clicks to modify icons for folders, drag things around, etc. When you are finished, you commit or cancel the changes in the small modal dialog. If you leave the checkbox selected, it will them put up a detailed dialog telling you what it is about to modify.

Generally, the menu info is saved in a dir.mnu file stored in the directory it affects. LLBs are a pretty old zip-type of file that we invented mostly to get around the 8.3 DOS names when we first ported to Win3. But they can also contain the palette info and are still somewhat useful. If you dig around inside the vi.lib/Rock Robotics/WPILib, you'll see that it uses folders and dir.mnu options.

You may find that some edits will save your modifications off to your My Documents location. This is generally because the folder of VIs contains a readOnly.txt file, telling the editor that it should not save to this location. If you want to make edits to your stuff directly, rename the file temporarily.

Installing the library to other machines only involves copying the folder to their computer. You can also do this with Source Code Control tools so that the whole group has synchronized libraries.

By the way, user.lib is located within Program Files/National Instruments/LabVIEW xxxx/. Also, if you don't want to use user.lib, you can instead place the files into vi.lib/addon. It is also set to Synchronize with Directory, so adding and removing folders will work to modify the palettes. You can also create your own WPILib subPalette and add that. It will modify the dir.nu for WPILib, so you may need to redo that once the 2016 release happens, but again, it can be in SCC and easily shared with a team of programmers.

For #2, an Arduino has its own dev tools, which is either a plus or minus, depending on your perspective. I'm not sure whether you are asking about C++ on the roboRIO as adding functionality, or exposure to C++. There isn't really a functional reason you need to switch tools, but learning additional tools is one aspect of FRC,

For #3, there are some resources on ni.com/frc to the QuickStartGuide. Also, I like the LEGO engineering stuff from Tufts. If you don't have any Mindstorms kits, it may be somewhat less useful, but the challenges are still of value.

Greg McKaskle