Hi all,
I am a new coach of an FTC team. Our Team has just gone from FLL to FTC we were hoping to use NXTG so that we don’t have to learn too many new technologies at once. The only problem as I see it is that I cannot for the life lof me find any information about how the joysticks communicate through the FTC blocks. I have gotten all the ftc blocks inserted and working. I can create a program that runs in autonomous mode using the controller Station. What I cannot do is get a simple motor to turn using the Tele op code from the robotics trainning site. They have great introductions to NXT programming but nothing on the joysticks and packets for FTC teleoperated mode.
Ok so this tutorial (which I have watched numerous time) talks a lot about labview and RobotC but barely touches on NXTG my problem specifically is that I don’t know how to get joystick information from the blue tooth to the motors.
The blocks you are describing are only available in the FTC software that shipped with last season’s KOP. This season FIRST suggests that teams who used NXT-G in the past to use it for initial testing and prototyping, but they recommend you to move to LabVIEW or RobotC for full competition support.
I highly recommend you and your students spend the time becoming familiar with the fully supported software (for example if the old NXT-G blocks don’t play nice with the FCS no one from LEGO or NI is going to fix it :ahh:). Since you have used NXT-G in the past LabVIEW will probably be the easiest software to pick up. There are a lot of training resources on the web for LabVIEW including the FIRST Community on www.ni.com/first and http://ftcmastery.com/. If you have any questions regarding using the tools or if you run into issues feel free to post of the forums at www.ni.com/first.
This topic is covered [briefly] about 20% into the video, before the LabVIEW section. The video shows how to connect the FTC Read Packet block to the FTC Read Controller block. The Read Controller block output sends commands (joystick Y1 & Y2) to the FTC Motor blocks.
I agree with you that the topic is not covered very thoroughly.