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Introduction

This wiki provides an introduction to the basic commands and procedures required to make a robot go. The primary reference source for most of the information here is the WPI FRC documentation wiki. The WPI documentation covers most aspects of robot design and build, but we will focus on software here.

Getting Started

Development System Requirements

Creating software for an FRC robot requires the installation of a few software packages on a Windows system:

• git SCM
• The FRC Game Tools
• The Java/C++ WPI Libraries
• You do not need to install LabView

The WPI documentation has detailed step-by-step instructions for installing these software packages (except for git) starting here. You will also need to install some vendor-specific libraries, but we'll discuss those later.

The WPI libraries include a specially-configured version of Visual Studio Code. If you already have VS Code installed on your machine, it is important that you use the special WPI configuration for working with FRC code and the robot. The installation routine will place an icon for this and a local copy of the WPI documentation on your desktop.

Cloning the Robot-Go repository

> git clone https://github.com/FRC8592/Robot-Go.git

All of our software efforts will make use of git Source Control Management (SCM). Using an SCM like git has many advantages:

• Our code is shared with the team. Anyone can see our code and anyone can modify our code. It can be downloaded anywhere. A useful collary is that our code is inherently backed up on github. If something happens to our laptop, we don't lose any work.
• Our software can be modified in private branches. This let's multiple people make changes to the code without interfering with each other. Modified code is merged to the main branch only after it is tested and ready to share.
• Git lets us tag our code to identify and retrieve an important version. For example, we may want to tag the code we take to a competition so that we know exactly what is on the robot.