Programming

This is the brains of the robot. When you push the joystick foreward, something has to tell the robot to move the motors foreward. Fortunately for all the novice programmers out there, the programming language used for the robot is similar to BASIC. There are some differences, because you are programming the actions of a robot as opposed to what you see on a computer screen, but there is still many similarities. There are a few things that teams should do regardless of what their objectives are.

Comments

Remember to comment your code. Just putting in lines every so often saying what the section of the code is for is a handy way to allow next years team to be able to understand what you wrote.

Also, comments can be used as anchors. Put a word like "DrillMotors" surrounted by a few "x"'s, and you get a way to go anywhere in the code you need to quickly, by using the find key. Just search for "xxDrillMotorsxx" and you can be taken to where you want to go.

Multiple Programmers

Trust me on this, you want to have more than one person programming the robot. If you need a change to the programming in order to add a new part and test it, you don't want to have to wait for a certain person to get there. The main programmer on my team got injured at the nationals, and was out for the last day. As such, we couldn't get the necessary programming in order to attach an additional part of the robot. It was something that could've been avoided had we had a second programmer. Make sure that, above all, you are not depending on a single member of your team for anything.

I would give you more information about the programming, but I did not do the programming last year, and as such I don't know too much about it. Once I learn more about the programming language itself, I will add on to this page.