There’s going to be a lot of information and code throughout this guide. If used effectively, the reader should be able to be able to program virtually any mechanism this team desires (or at least have the knowledge to figure out how) – but emphasis on effectively. Copying code directly from here without understanding will only harm you. Take the time to ask questions in our Slack and debug issues on your own: after all, programmers are really just skilled problem solvers in (programming) languages.
The goal of this document is to help you understand the ins and outs of our robot code so you as an individual are capable of programming a robot by yourself if need be. Don’t skip steps or take shortcuts! This guide builds upon itself and skipping chapters is just gonna make it harder on you. But beyond even understanding robot code, the goal is to ensure you can program mechanisms with nothing but your understanding of a mechanism, WPILib, and a valid IDE. Just like how there’s no guide to life, eventually each and every one of you will need to program without an example to go off of – and this guide aims to prepare you for that.
Installation is (unfortunately) a necessary part of the programming process. Chances are even if you follow everything here perfectly, something will go wrong and you’ll spend some time looking for the solution. It is going to suck and that is okay. Or maybe everything works first try and you avoid the misery which is installation issues. Feel free to ask questions in Slack if something is bugging you too much but try to debug the issues yourself! It’s a painful, yet valid experience that’ll help you get used to what debugging is like sometimes.