In some cases you may have a subsystem which you want to always be running a command no matter what. So what do you do when the command you are currently running ends? That's where default commands come in.

A newly created command based robot project will have a set of default files and packages that were provided by the template. Using these files will make it easy to extend the default program into a custom robot program for your application.

This article is about command based programming in C++. If using Java, click here.

There is a plugin for Workbench that will make the creation and editing of command-based robot programs much simpler. The plugin had built-in templates for various types of commands, subsystems, and an overall robot program template. To use the plugin it must first be installed from the internet.

You can cause commands to run when joystick buttons are pressed, released, or continuously while the button is held down. This is extremely easy to do only requiring a few lines of code.

There are two ways of declaring an object variable: either as an instance of the object or a pointer to an instance of the object. In the former case the variable holds the object and the object is created (“instantiated”) at the same time. In the latter case the variable only has space to hold the address of the object. It takes another step to create the object instance using the new operator and assign its address to the variable.