Where to begin programming the roboRIO?

[MAXOFLIFE]

Our team this year has virtually no labview experience other than making basic problem solvers. Where would be the best place to start from the ground up regarding programming the robot? I'm assuming we'll just use an edited version of the basic code that is included with Labview 2014, but we don't have enough knowledge to do that. Since this is practically our first year, we are going simple with two motors to control the wheels and one motor to control a forklift like structure. We understand how to build the robot mechanically, but we need to figure out how to control basic motors.

We have Talon SR motor controllers and the motors that came in our FRC box. Everything will be controlled by a USB Xbox controller. Our basic idea was to control the two wheel motors with two thumbsticks, one being forward/back and the other being left/right. Then the left and right triggers would control the one other motor making it go either clockwise or counter clockwise to lift the forklift up and down.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post! We appreicate any help we can get!

[rkm44]

Hi MAXOFLIFE,

There are actually a lot of getting started guides available for FRC. We also have tutorials about how to get started with motor control. Here are some of those links:

• FRC LabVIEW Quick Start Guide: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-34661
• Basic Motor Control Tutorial: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-14723
• FRC Training Materials and Resources: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-8923
• WPI 2015 FRC Control System (more getting started info): http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485

I would take a look through some of these links as well as the shipping tutorials and examples in LabVIEW. For some joystick examples, the Teleop VI located in any new FRC roboRIO project is a good VI to play around with. If you run into any errors or specific LabVIEW code architecture questions, we will be happy to help!