BetterHwMapGet

Syntactic sugar for the typical hardwareMap.get()

Basically, due to type erasure with Java generics, when using HardwareMap.get(Class::class, "name"), you need to manually pass in the class of the component you want to get, e.g.

val motor = hardwareMap.get(DcMotorEx::class.java, "motor")

Using reified types and operator overloading, we can simply do this instead:

val motor = hardwareMap<DcMotorEx>("motor")
//or
val motor: DcMotorEx = hardwareMap("motor")

Also, for why I did not simply use get, it's because the get name is already taken by the HardwareMap class :(

And yes, this just makes me feel cool. Shut up.

tip

If you try to type in hardwareMap<*>("whatever") and the IDE is giving you a hard time trying to import the right method, just type in hardwareMap.invoke until it auto-completes for you and imports the right method.

Then you can just delete .invoke and you're good to go.

This is because this trick is done by overriding the invoke operator, which is a special operator in Kotlin.