Making autonomous accessible to all teams

[theprgramerdude]

Originally Posted by dirienzo

What new methods do you think are needed? Or what methods supplied already need to be changed? A decent autonomous mode can be created by what is supplied by WPI, I think.

This is true. For example, at the 10,000 Lakes regional, I was unable to test my autonomous code until actually reaching the event, as we shipped the Crio on the robot and didn't have a spare. When I realized that I made a serious error in the code, I scrapped everything I wrote (this was 5 minutes before our first qualifying match, and I had spent the entire day before debugging to no success), and proceeded to use just four lines of code to run our autonomous for the entire event. It worked great, scoring 3 goals total while in the front zone.

The lines consisted of the following in the c++ autonomous periodic loop:
RobotDriveTrainObject->Drive(-1,0);
Wait(1.0);
RobotDriveTrainObject->Drive(1,0);
Wait(1.0);

This isn't hard to figure out how to use. The problem isn't that the code is obfuscated for simple controls (for other parts, yes, it is, hands down), but that the knowledge on how to do something like this isn't readily available. The WPI guides are pretty obscure in explaining how this works to teams that don't have students already proficient in c++/java.