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Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
I'm a mentor. I've been through 4 years of a good engineering school, and taken numerous programming classes.
If you asked me to program an omni drive, it really isn't that hard. There a couple different ways of doing it, all ways that highschool team members can use where they can at least grasp the concepts. If you asked ME to create the gyro code? The vision code? Then we wouldn't have it. How many teams ran gyro / vision before Kevin Watson on the IFI code? I guess where I'm going with this is that in many cases most teams wouldn't have working robots if you didn't give them prepackaged code. Giving them that prepackaged code also helps level the playing field. As a veteran team we have a TON of premade .vi's from last year - averaging filters, trigger vi's, write picture vi's, autonomous vi's. Recoding them from year to year using the newer members of the team is a great teaching tool. If I were a new team? Well, the task is staggering just getting a simple mechanism to function. Would swerve drives even be popular and well understood if we hadn't had some pioneer teams that led the way and developed at least the concepts? How many other teams have been able to do that because of those pioneering teams and the amount of help and advice they offered to other teams? I certainly wouldn't have the faintest clue how to write that vision vi to track that target this year. How many teams would have managed to both write one AND make it robust? 2? 3? So far, I can't say I've seen anything that is too prepackaged. It DOES push the veteran teams further when code they've written and taken for granted is suddenly freely available in finished form to the other teams. Suddenly that vet team has to start all over to differentiate themselves. Not a bad thing. |
Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
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Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
Yes, things like WPILib make programming the robot a lot easier than it used to be. Some teams would be lost without it, unable to get their robot to do anything, and by that merit alone it's worth keeping around.
Other teams see the code that's available, and get in over their heads because they don't understand how or why the code works. Yet other teams have students with the knowledge and capability to do what needs to be done without using WPILib. The question i struggle with here, however: Is WPILib holding some kids back? What i mean by that, is the presence of such easy to use, good code getting some kids/teams so comfortable that they stop pushing their own boundaries? I think we can all agree... once you've written code to make the robot work one year, writing the code for the next year is a lot easier. Do teams push the boundaries, and continue to challenge their members? This year, we had the returning members and the freshmen members on the programming team. The freshman have, so far, gotten to code the "easier" sections, like controlling the kicker (a simple on/off with a limit switch attached). The returning members got more complicated with working on the Mecanum and PID loops, something we hadn't had need of before. So for us, everyone got to be challenged and work at the limits of their capabilities, without getting in over their heads. What concerns me as a mentor is 3 years from now, when the freshmen are seniors, how do we keep them engaged? How do we present them with a challenge they haven't seen before in programming? This is our teams 4 year - the first and second were filled almost entirely with seniors, making this the first year we've really had a strong returning team, where the returning members outnumber the new ones. As such, we haven't had to deal with these types of problems, yet... |
Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
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If so, I'm wondering why you chose not to use the built-in closed-loop speed control available in the Jag firmware. I ask because our team is weighing this decision now. Thank you. ~ |
Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
As a new programmer, I find the code very helpful. There are things I just couldn't do without it. At the same time, I still had to learn how to implement the code. This is my second year on the team - last year, we used the really simple LabView layout, which gave me a good intro to how the robot worked. This year, I used Java, which I was able to do partly from the code given last year, and partly due to the provided code, which gave me a starting point to see both how the code worked with the robot from Java and a working example to try new things on. I say I, because this year I am the only programmer on the team.
And, NetBean's Ctrl-Shift-B (shows the source) helps me figure out exactly what it does and how, to understand it. So, my opinion on the matter is that, especially for newer and smaller teams, that the canned code is almost necessary to have a working robot in 6 weeks. |
Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
I think Kim hit it right on the head. I just think that some teams have started EXPECTING it to be easy, and start complaining when they can't figure out how to use the latest new widget we were given, instead of taking it apart (looking at the source) to see how it works.
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Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
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So instead, we focused on why Mecanum drive works, how it works, what the code needs to do to make it work, what the response curves would be to make it work, etc... let the returning members create a few different implementations that may work and let the drive team test them out (with the provided code included as well) - determine which is best, why it's the best, etc. Basically, we give them a glimpse into the development-test-development cycle many companies go through, and a chance to evaluate provided off-the-shelf software and determine why it's the best choice (if it is). Once that was finished, we got more complicated with PID loops, going through the exercise of figuring out why they work, how they work, implementing our own, testing, etc. When dealing with smart, driven students, sometimes the easy, out of the box option is just too boring to be truly inspirational :) I say a good day for a FIRST mentor is when the student walks into the meeting and says "I was thinking about this <mechanism, algorithm, strategy, whatever> we were looking at last time, and had an awesome idea..." A bad day for a mentor is when the students are only engaged while at the meetings, and do no creative thinking outside. |
Re: The increasing amount of pre-canned code
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http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?p=916383 I would be most interested to hear what your team did, if you would be willing to share. ~ |
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