Interest in a comprehensive LabVIEW tutorial aimed solely at FRC?

Technical NI LabVIEW
1

I know there are a few (I’ve seen maybe 2 or 3?) LabVIEW tutorials out there for FRC teams. Myself and an alumnus on our team have been thinking of creating a video series that would hopefully take someone with 0 programming experience, and bring them up to speed on pretty much every tool an FRC programmer would use (besides some of the more advanced techniques).

I think primary advantages would be that it’d come from a student’s perspective, and it would take what I see as a more logical teaching path than other tutorials. Here is the general layout:

Course Outline:

Unit 1: Understanding Programming (7 videos)
-“What is Programming?”
-“Popular programming languages and their types”
-“Quality Requirements”
-“Readability”
-“Debugging”
-“Basic Programming Concepts” (input/output, boolean, loops, etc)
-“Programming Terminology”

For the next 4 units, I’ll add the individual section later if you guys are interested

Unit 2: Introduction to LabVIEW (12-14 videos)
-These videos would cover non-FRC LabVIEW basics

Unit 3: LabVIEW in an FRC Environment (11 videos)
-These videos would cover the main VI’s, managing your code and deploying/building it, and FRC-specific sub-VI’s

Unit 4: “Hands-On” Robot work (9 videos)
-These videos would cover all of the non-coding elements that a programmer must know (cRIO, setting up networking settings, camera setup, sensor knowledge, etc)

Unit 5: Advanced LabVIEW Techniques (6-8 videos)
-Would involve things like debugging, optimizing code, PID, multi-step autonomous code, custom VI’s, etc)

Obviously this would be a nearly 50 video series - something students would watch in the off-season, or could reference individual videos when they need a review or have to learn a specific skill. I just want to see if the CD LabVIEW community thinks there is even a need for such a guide. The videos would be hosted on YouTube, and be developed over the next few weeks/months (obviously free time is slim with the season underway).

Thanks for reading, I look forward to your comments!

2

Sounds great, though I think text + images would work better than a video, as they are much easier to maintain and update, whereas nothing kills tutorial videos faster than date.

Plus, if you’d have a very well-written textual FRC guide to LabVIEW 2012 in time for the 2014 kickoff, it’d be very possible to change it right in the first few days of the next season so teams could use an up-to-date LV2013 guide for that very season.

If you want, I could help by translating (with either subtitles or actual translation depending on whether you use text or videos) the guide to Hebrew for teams from the Isreal regional.

3

I certainly don’t mean to discourage you, but that sounds like a LOT of work. Perhaps it would be easier to do supplements to other training already available. For example, FRCMastery does a pretty good job at many of those.

Greg McKaskle

4

I think the benefit of having many smaller videos would make the updating process manageable. If a LabVIEW update changes the content of a subject, just that small lesson could be re-recorded (probably in 5 minutes or so). I have used text-based programming guides before for LabVIEW and haven’t found them quite as effective dues to its visual nature. I will definitely consider your idea of using more pictures however, and I’ll keep the subtitles comment in mind.

5

I am looking into consolidating a number of the videos, but I agree that it is a large task. FRCMastery is definitely a great series (which I learned from when I was a freshman), but I feel that it skips a number of elements and doesn’t have an effective teaching flow. I’ll look into it some more - there’s a good chance some of the content I have planned already exists in a nicely laid out form on FRCMastery.

6

Have you seen this set of videos free to FRC students & mentors. It appears pretty comprehensive to me.

Phil Gold
Team 1410

Here is the link to the free LabVIEW training for FRC teams.

Near the end of the text, click on the words registration form and fill out the registration form per the special instructions (including team # etc.)

7

The main problem I have with the Sixclear tutorial is that, although it does a good job of teaching LabVIEW in general, it doesn’t do an efficient job of teaching what a rookie FRC programmer would need to know. There is a lot of extraneous information that an FRC programmer would rarely use, and it’s also missing key info that they would use.