Pathfinder Library Instalation
My team is currentely experimenting with the pathfinder and dosent know how to add this to a current programming project. We have read throught the Read.me on the git hub page and cant find anythng on adding it to elipse except for the 2 files that need to be added to the wpi lib. We also cant find where the program where you select your waypoints is in the files
Before I begin, I’d like to address your use of Eclipse. Starting in 2019, Eclipse with ANT building will no longer be supported by FIRST. I highly recommend you switch over to IntelliJ (my preference) or VSCode (the official IDE). Through these you can use something called Gradle to automatically import the libraries you want.Here is a link to the base project to get started. Go ahead and download the QuickStart.zip file to get going. Regardless, Eclipse uses certain tools to add files to the classpath of the project. In order to add things to the classpath and use them within your program, you need to add them through the tools. To do this, you can follow this guide to do that. For now, I recommend you use Pathfinder 1.0 since it is easier to use when you are first getting started. Once you have gotten the library into your project, you can begin work using the Pathfinder library. As for your question about selecting waypoints, Pathfinder doesn’t include software for selecting them on a map or image of the field, rather it is purely a means of inputting raw coordinates. It may be hard to get your head around, but Pathfinder doesn’t have a central coordinate plane. You control it by selecting where your robot starts, and making points relative to your start location. It also doesn’t have any units by default. Truly, Pathfinder is a library that has less to do with robots and much more to do with math. What Pathfinder really does it take your points, turn them into equations of curves, and then uses those equations to send data to your motors. It doesn’t have any sanity checking, unit checking, or even time checking. Your units can be whatever you want them to be (but I recommend inches). As for where you define them, there isn’t one answer. You need to create an ArrayList of the WayPoint object, and you can do that anywhere. Add your Waypoints to that array, and then use that array in the generate method. The creation of the WayPoint array can be seen in here in the Java Tank example.
Question on this. Do you need the 2019 beta firmware in order to deploy code to the Rio? I have tried doing this yesterday. The past code was deleted, but the new code was never deployed.
Not if you use an alpha version of the VS Code plugin. I believe the beta plugin requires 2019 firmware, or will when it’s released.
Thanks for this information. Is there any way to get the firmware, or do you have to sign up to be a beta tester?
I’m pretty sure you need to be a beta test team. My team has used alpha 4 from https://github.com/wpilibsuite/vscode-wpilib/releases with 2018 firmware and hasn’t had issues that I’m aware of.
Beta teams can not distribute beta software, because once in the “wild” you know it never comes back. Someone out there will get it and install it and have a horrible competition or lose weeks of development because of it. Safer to not release to the public until it’s ready.
Ah! Thank you for this. I never bothered to scroll down the github page to see this. Looking into it now, I see that I installed the Beta version for VSCode and not the Alpha.