Hawks Robotics Documentation
Welcome to our documentation hub! This website contains all the information you'll need to write code for our team.
New to this?
We code in a variety of languages. Java and Kotlin are used on the robot, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Typescript and Markdown are used in our documentation and website, Python is used in our physics simulations—there's a whole lot of stuff going on in this codebase.
With that being said, as a beginner you'll mostly be writing in Java and maybe the occasional Kotlin file as you become more experienced. You may need to write some documentation in Markdown as well, although it's trivally easy to learn—it's like writing a Google Doc, so I wouldn't worry about it.
If you are new to the Java language or just programming as a whole, consider watching this Java tutorial. You don't have to follow the tutorial, just watch it. We'll go over everything you need to do later. We'll also glance at Kotlin later on as well.
When you feel ready to begin, head over to our onboarding guide.
If you don't want to jump into text-based code right away, you can use the First Tech Challenge's Blocks language. It's a visual programming language that looks a lot like Scratch.
You can also use the OnBot Java Editor to play around with the basics of text-based programming, but you'll need to switch to a more powerful IDE for advanced code—we'll get into that later.
Need Help?
To get help, check out the following support resources:
Guides
Wikis & Fourms
Javadocs
Advanced Information
Samples
The codebase contains a large selection of Sample OpModes (robot code examples) in FtcRobotController/external which can be of great help for writing your own code.
Want to change something here?
If you want to edit the content of these docs, you'll need to know at least a bit of Markdown. If you want to change the look & feel, you may need to know some or all of the following depending on what you want to do: HTML, CSS, Javascript and/or Typescript.
To make changes, read up on our documentation guide.