New team getting started on Robotics Programming

[NiteStriker]

Hey everyone, I'm currently a junior in high school, and we just started our school's first Robotics team. I'm mainly here to ask about programming a robot for the first time. We've talked to other Robotics teams around they area and most of them seem to be using LabView. While I'm aware that we could program our robot using other languages (C/C++, etc) since we have some members with experience in that area, I'm not really sure if we should look into using LabView instead. I myself know a bit about programming in C/C++ but I'm not really sure if I can get the hang of programming things graphically with LabView.  Is it easier to program robots with LabView?

[LabViewEnthusiast]

WHOAH! Giant question. You could write a book about how great LabVIEW is. Actually, people have..........

In short: YES. In short but more detailed: The graphical approach to programming is very intuitive and works well. I like the quote from NI where they say "you program like you think". In graphical programming you can easily see the flow of information and the order of steps. Debugging in LabVIEW has been praised time after time by many programmers and I agree. People have also said it's easier to learn if you are new at programming. Multiple times I have heard that if you are a new team and/or you are especially struggling, do LabVIEW. However, older teams with lots of experience with C have been recommended to stick with that since they've got their rhythm going.  I also really like LabVIEW's concept of the Front Panel: a sort of (very) customizable control panel where you can provide input into your program and view output. Especially with FIRST, it is not very hard to learn LabVIEW with all the great resources, especially since they have made it so much more easy for us in terms of actually controlling the robot (the libraries they give us are really easy and helpful). There are a couple other things that I also like about it, but they are not as major and I don't want to write a 50000 word essay before your eyes.

If you want to learn more, you've come to the right place. But here's some more resources:

NI's tutorials for FIRST on LabVIEW and programming FRC hardware. VERY nice, highly recommended. This may be all you need to succeed (besides some extra manual reading).

Chief Delphi. As a new team, you may not have heard about this yet, but it's a indescribable FIRST resource. It's a big forum that pretty much every FIRST member participates in. You can find ton's of information and literally receive an answer to a question in less than a minute. It's not just for programming though, it's about anything and everything.

LVMastery.com Great learning resource, the author posts here a lot about his video blogs. I know enough about LabVIEW that I don't care to learn more about it, so I actually haven't looked at much of this site. But it looks great and I hear a lot about it. Search around here for other things about it.

Hope that helps! Of course this is a big decision and you should take great consideration in it. So research, ask other teams, get your hands dirty, try it out, weigh your options, and see what will work best for you. You've got a lot of the pre-season ahead of you during which you can figure this out and start learning how to program.

[MarkBlack]

To add the LabVIEWEnthusiast's reply...

Learning more than one programming language will always benefit you in the long run.  During the FRC season last year I met a team of students who had the opportunity to learn Visual Basic,  C/C++, and Java in several courses offered at their school.  Even so this team decided to use LabVIEW to program their robot.  They did this not only for all the reasons LabVIEWEnthusias mentioned, but also because they knew the importance of the opportunity to learn yet another programming language.  I certainly wished I had done the same before entering college.

Good luck and don't ever hesitate to post questions here!

Cheers,

Mark

LabVIEW R&D

[NiteStriker]

Thanks for the replies, I appreciate it 

I'll have to discuss this with the team during our next meeting.

[LabViewEnthusiast]

BLAQmx has a very good point. When we were discussing this same topic, I was thinking that in some point of my life/career  I'm going to learn C because of how widespread it is. Low and behold, I recently bought some hobby stuff that requires C and I've been learning since. I'm sure I'll learn it more in college or something like that too.

(I bought the and Arduino microcontroller, it's really great)