In previous years, the robot has been programmed in C. FIRST provided some default code that worked fine for almost all cases, and teams made modifications to the code if they wanted extra features (to add a sensor or a camera, for example). Most of the code to control the robot was placed in one function that was called several times per second. Each time it was called, this function was given the current sensor values, and it returned the motor speed values to the controller.

Programming the robot was simple as long as no extra sensors were needed. But if you wanted to use an encoder (to find how fast the gears were moving) or set up a different drive method than the one given by default, it required each team to write essentially the same code for the task. So to save work, WPILib was developed. This is a library that contains the common tasks teams need to do: use different drive control systems, control sensors, etc.

We are currently employing LabView, which is a graphical programming language.