LV Mastery Bringing Your LabVIEW™ Capabilities to Light

This Blog entry is the 14th in a series intended primarily for FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams and their mentors.

In this blog entry, I take you through team 843's 2009 FRC code. The purpose of this video is not so much to teach new concepts, but to relate back to ones taught in previous Tip Jars.

I discuss:
The concept of robustness: good code can be easily modified, debugged, scaled to work in different situations.
The Block Diagram, Begin VI, TeleOp VI, Lifter VI, Steering VI, Debugging VI, and Autonomous Independent.
The uses of the “Command Signal”: initializing it, writing to it, and reading from it.
The use of “Boolean trigger” to have actions take press on joystick button presses only when pressed or released.
A consistent and robust approach for programming a robot function VI using a "shifter".
How to create and use “Re-entrant VIs” to modularize and reuse code for identical robot subsystems in parallel.
How to use the command signal architecture to create a simple autonomous VI which uses the full functionality of your robot code.