What is Easy C good for?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Donut

I believe there's some value in doing coding by hand, but when speed is a necessity EasyC Pro certainly seems a good option.

Eh, be careful with that.. EasyC is GREAT at what it does: facilitating robot programming for non experienced programmers. It is also pretty good to throw some quick debugging code up on the robot, to check sensors and such. But for the most part, I have to agree with Jamie. Writing the code by hand will be much faster and much more efficient.

The reason why easyC programs are so fast and easy to set up is not because of its graphical nature, but rather the framework the programs you make sit on top of. WPILib takes a pretty high level approach to programming the robot, and thats where the speed in development comes from. Because you dont have to spend time meddling with interrupts, fast/slow loops, low-level output variables, etc, you can just jump right in and start programming for functions of your robot. If you like what you're seeing with WPILib, keep in mind that you can have the best (or at least what I think is the best) of both worlds. You can import the library into your C projects in your IDE of choice (I use code::blocks), and have it cranking out hex files for the robot in less than 10 minutes.

If you're interested, keep checking back over the next few days.. I will be putting up a default workspace for code::blocks that works right out of the box with WPILib and MCC18. With this you have the ability to use an awesome, middle weight IDE, and select ON THE SPOT which controller you want to use (FRC07, FRC05, VEX) without changing any of your source code.