Programming team learning resources

Resources for team members wanting to learn to program our bot, vision subsystem, LEDs, and more.

Table of Contents

• Autonomous routines using Choreo
• PID control
• Swerve drive PID tuning
• Field localization (finding where you're at on the field)
• A turret control class taken from a YouTube vid by another FRC team
• We made a few modifications to the CTRE-generated swerve drive base. This document describes those changes so we can re-use those mods in future years.

Tools

The tools we use for programming are:

• Visual Studio Code — Microsoft's free, open source code editor is now the preferred programming tool for FIRST teams.
• GitHub — We store all our source code in GitHub. This makes it easily available to every member. Plus, by publishing it with an open source license, by FIRST rules we can re-use code as well as use code published by other teams.

GitHub

• GitHub learning lab

Visual Studio Code

• Microsoft's intro tutorial

Programming languages

We use:

• Java — to program the bot
  • WPLib — is a Java add-on library that we use to control the bot
• Python — for computer vision, target identification, etc.
  • OpenCV — is a library for image processing, computer vision, etc. which is available for Python (and other languages)
• Arduino/C++ — for controlling the LED "blinkies"

Java

Java is the primary programming language we use for controlling the bot.

• Free Udemy Java course
• Learn Java Online
• Codecademy (just skip the paid lessons)

WPILib

Wooster Polytechnic provides the primary robot control library.

• WPIlib documentation
• WPI library API docs

Python

Python is what we use with certain Limelight pipelines to perform custom computer vision, target identification, etc.

Installing Python

We use python 3.x (not the older v2.7 that comes installed on some systems). Make sure you install and use the correct version. Visit https://www.python.org/ to install Python if verion 3.x is not already installed on your system

Learning Python

• How to code in Python 3 A free e-book (epub & PDF formats) from Digital Ocean (also available in WorldCat
• Automate the Boring Stuff with Python A free e-book (read online) that teaches programming with Python
• LearnPython.org - a basic tutorial. Note that this is an older web site and none of their interactive code snippets seem to run any more. But you can run the code locally.
• Codecademy - free python course (just skip over the paid modules)
• Codeschool - free python course
• Udacity Programming Foundations with python - free video-based course
• Google's python tutorial - not the snazziest of tutorials, but covers the basics

OpenCV

OpenCV is a great open source computer vision library. It is a big and complex library that can be hard to navigate. There are OpenCV versions for Python, C/C++, Java & Android, and iOS.

We suggest you wait to explore OpenCV until you have a good feel for programming in Python.

Some learning resources:

• Team 254's presentation on computer vision and motion control (worth watching to get an idea of what can be done as well as how to do it)
• OpenCV-Python Tutorials
• PyImageSearch
• LearnOpenCV.com
• Tim Poulsen's blog

Arduino / C++

For our LED strips, we use an Arduino controller and the C++ programming language.

• Our LED repo covers the basics of how our LEDs and Arduino are setup as well as the code we've used in the past
• Adafruit's tutorials Adafruit is a supplier of Arduino boards, compatibles, and components. They offer a good selection of tutorials