Okay, I’m a second year programmer, and I didn’t exactly learn a whole lot last year with programming due to distractions. We don’t have a programming mentor either. I was wondering, how exactly do you compile in MPLAB IDE v7.20? I can’t remember what we did when we worked on last year’s robot. Thanks to any that give me some advice!
~CHSboy
You’re in for a very rude awakening - we’re no longer using the IFI RC with a pair of Microchip PICs. You need to install either Wind River or LabVIEW tools for programming this year’s CompactRIO from National Instruments.
Check out the following website for all the resources that you should need -
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc/content.aspx?id=10934
Russ
We have those. I guess I’ll have to figure things out with one of them then…
Good Luck! I hope that you’re rested up since you probably won’t have a lot of time to sleep this weekend.
One important note to remember - teams are allowed to withhold their control system (including driver console) so that they can continue to develop software before the first regionals. You’ll probably want to consider that option.
Russ
That’s about where I was a week ago. But don’t panic! We are here! 
Which way you want to go (LabVIEW or Wind River) is up to you; if you are fairly proficient at writing in C or C++, you will probably be better off with Wind River, because that is a C/C++ environment. You will want to be comfortable reading source code to understand how everything works, because the documentation for WPIlib is still pretty rough; most of the code is the documentation.
LabVIEW, on the other hand, is very well-documented, and a graphical language. There is a series of video tutorials on how to use LabVIEW on the National Instruments site here. You don’t need to write any code at all; the entire language consists of wiring terminals on “virtual instruments” together. This is probably the route you’d want to go with if you aren’t familiar with C++.
Either way, there is a LOT of information on the FRC Control System page. You are going to need to know pretty much everything that is in all of the PDFs linked to from that page, and links to more LabVIEW help are there, also.
If you have any questions at all, let us know.
Jacob
Yeah. I can’t exactly figure out how to get Wind River running on this laptop. Can’t seem to find the startup icon, and I don’t want to bother with the nearly neverending installation again.
Thanks for the links. I’ll be sure to post again if I am in need of assistance.
~CHSboy