In your opinion, what's the best beginners tool to help teams with autonomous?

[AlexanderTheOK]

Back to actually doing the autonomous, the most important problem to solve is movement, and as the others have mentioned, the encoders and gyro are the tools you should focus on figuring out how to use.

As for "beginners tools" I imagine you mean something along the command based system where you can write code inside a framework provided for you by wpilib and queue such "commands" up. I don't know of any such tool for labview but I'm sure it exists somewhere.

Even if and when you find one however, I have to say that in my experience the several such systems I have tried have always been less than useful, not because of some shortcoming on the side of the developers, but because by their nature they put another "black box" between your code and the robot.

I would highly recommend writing your own code when creating the "scheduling" of the autonomous components. (drive straight 3 meters, then turn right, etc...) This is both more reliable in my opinion because the student in charge knows exactly what is going on, and it is a valuable learning experience.

You will be a bit more limited in terms of flexibility and convenience compared to using such a tool, however I believe that the pros of working from scratch outweigh the pros of working with a tool like the Command Based system (not necessarily that system itself itself.)


In fact, even once y'all aren't beginners anymore, I would still recommend writing your own stuff from scratch, except I recommend writing your own tools that make autonomous programs convenient to write, again both due to the learning experience and benefit of comprehending more of the robot's code.

Best of luck.