Please open source your code!
 

We saw a lot of interesting robots this year and of course CMP will bring some interesting improvements to these already great robots. We've seen things from multi tube autonomous modes to camera tracking - it's been an exciting year for programmers.

We've found a lack of teams open sourcing their code. The FIRST community involves a lot of sharing, but so few teams are sharing code.

If you have some interesting code, especially the power house teams who are doing some extremely neat things with the help of professional software engineers - please open source!

We'd be happy to host code for other teams if you do not already have it up on a site like GitHub or Google Code.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

Team THRUST 1501 has posted code to all our robots since 2005.

You can find our source code here. www.frcsoft.com

Enjoy...

Re: Please open source your code!
 

The HOT Team makes their source code available on our website after the season is over. The code from last year is on the site right now.
http://frcteam67.dyndns.org/Programming.htm

The HOT Team allows the students to develop our code. We divide the programming group into two groups--one develops in LabView and the other in C++. The mentors guide them but do not develop code. We find that this method provides a healthy competition between the groups to be the best.

During the season we use one group's code at two events and the other at the other two events. So we used LabView at the Michigan State Championship and we will be using C++ at the Championship.

By the way, you will also find some of the drawings of our robots on our website.

After the Championship, we open everything and put it on the website in the hope that this will help make FIRST even better.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

Last year I posted my code here.

I am planning on posting my code after Championships.

For the past two years, all of our code has been written by me (current Junior at NDP).

This years code has a lot of goodies - beescript 1.0 (autonomous scripting), multi-tube autonomous (basically just base functions that drive and turn reliably, and a script to set the sequence/distances), elevator state-machine capable of state lookup and special state handling (e.g. score sequencing, over-the-back anti-death, and a few other special moves), and drivetrain speed control with position holding.

OH - I almost forgot - I have code to talk to a FRC-CMUcam2 from the cRio, although it isn't used due to lack of need during teleop and the time it takes to align automatically.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

I'd also like to see more open source code in FIRST, but you got to remember that there's already so much code given to us that I don't think every team needs to go open source.

Maybe only the teams with the most complex drive trains or best auton, but certainly not every team who just has drive forward for x, turn, etc.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

I'll throw out a link to our bitbucket -- it isn't kept updated very well as we can't access it from our build site. The commit history isn't very nice either because we started using it near the start of competition season. I'll be sure to update it after Championships.

Our documentation is horrible... need to work on that with the kids.

https://bitbucket.org/team1675/team1675-2011

Re: Please open source your code!
 

Team 166 hosts all our code on Googlecode, so it's constantly available at http://code.chopshop166.com - It contains code for our main robot (chopshop11) as well as a bunch of random code in paradebot10 - we never changed the name of it - to run different things on our demonstration robot - drive and grill.
The main body, though is the competition code, which runs on top of our Framework that we've developed over the last two years. The entire system runs in parallel, and has a special class set up to read data from each task as well as from the "physical" joysticks, which allows us to override joysticks with ease, simply by simulating them like so:We've also been working on improving our logging system to make it as simple to use as possible, as well as some other neat things, like automatic newpress checking and TWO different ways to create a Task with more safety and useability than the default VxWorks tasks. (One of which plays very nicely with C++0x's Lambda functions...or it would if we could use them...)

Re: Please open source your code!
 

451 has ours at https://bitbucket.org/byteit101/logo/src
We have our very good line following code in LineFollowing.cpp with the control in Main.cpp. The strait line code worked 11 of 12 matches at Knoxville (the 1 was my fault, I made it go faster instead of slower), and with tweaking of the height, it works with forking also.
We also have one really nice CAN loop, the minibot deployer motor has two limit switches set up near the end of Main.cpp, and we had a pot control before we removed it due to many issues with the mech (in Forklift.cpp at revision dca663151f5d )

Re: Please open source your code!
 

This gave me an idea. What if a few teams got together and over the course of 6 weeks developed a very similar code in parallel all the time publishing it to the web. Open source development. I don't think I personally would want to do this because of the time requirement getting the code out there, commenting it, ect but it's an idea.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

(I forgot to mention that 166's code is only C++, but we DO use a little bit of python to parse the memory logs)

Max, are you suggesting creating (basically) the same code but for all four languages? As awesome as that sounds, there are a couple of problems with it, namely, different languages might make it easier to do some things than others. For example, I haven't seen any way to create multiple "tasks" in Labview like you can in C++, but the way the language itself is set up you might not even need them - just stick the code in parallel lines and it'll execute round-robin style multitasking. (I'm not an expert in Labview, so I may be wrong)
This just boils down to "what would this open source code do that would be better than the default code for that language?" Remember, we wouldn't be able to write too much code the same unless the robots were the same.

That said, if there are some actual guidelines written up by the teams participating, and the goals clearly stated, then it MAY work.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

Dragging down another While loop is a LabVIEW task.
You can also use Timed Loops which are RT tasks (they will always be called exactly at the interval you specify)
You can also use a Static Ref + Call By Ref Node to call a function by ref, and you can set one of the properties of Call By Ref to not wait before continuing (calling the ref in a new thread)

Re: Please open source your code!
 

We have a really nice autonomous that we will probably be using again next year (doesn't matter the game it will work) so we have to post it somewhere. I'll talk to our other programer and see if he wants to post all our code somewhere. We've been working on a Library of our own VIs that will eventually get posted on our Website.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

How strict is this open source rule? Would you get penalized for essentially writing a previous years code? (ie; same task, written differently)
And how would a team that uses the default code every year end up? :p

All that being said, 3266's code is extremely messy, but I'll release it how we used it at Buckeye. Maybe I'll put up a cleaner version along side it, just so you guys won't associate me as the kid who writes nested ifs EVERYWHERE!

Re: Please open source your code!
 

We open source our code every year. It's a bit amusing to see the evolution from year to year, honestly. :)

This year our code was written in python. http://www.virtualroadside.com/FRC

Re: Please open source your code!
 

In my interpretation of the rule, as long as the code you are using is available for other FRC teams to use the rule is satisfied. Therefore open-sourcing a library which you developed this year would allow you to use it in future years (at least that is how my team has understood the rules).

My team has placed all of our code and documentation into one place located here: http://tinyurl.com/frc2022docs. This site contains all of our code since our founding in 2007 under the area called "Programming Documents" and it contains our documentation area which we are in the process of creating. We saw a need for the documentation from year to year because releasing the code isn't enough to teach people how to program it, so we are creating little tutorials to help with that.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

My team only has our past code from the last three years, and it's only REALLY organized for the last two. We always believed it meant what imac thought.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

I read the rule as if it is publicly available to every other team (hosted on a web site) then you can use the exact same code...that's what we plan on doing. seeing as how we will have one experienced programmer next year, it should help him out a lot. I have been our main programmer, along with one other kid, and our main mentor for software was my dad (I taught him LabView basics, then we both leaned together). The Library should help seeing as I won't be anywhere close so I can help, the other programers will at least have starting blocks.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

FRC 1024's code since 2009 is at http://lukeshu.ath.cx/1/FRC/hg/ (well, actually the 2009 code is a Java port of the original LabVIEW code, it's missing autonomous (which wasn't worth porting anyway), and traction control). All of it is Java. 2009 code is GPLv2+, after that it's 3-clause BSD. In 2010-11, there is a .hardware package withing the main package. While largely hardware specific to our robot, there's some generic stuff (some encoder stuff, some IR stuff, some PID stuff). Also, in the 2011 code is an experimental plug-n-play CAN driver, which is nifty, but has not been tested.

I've got the C code from several years before that, but there are a few source files that say they can't be publicly redistributed. One of these days I'll audit them or whatever, and throw them up. If you want to see it, I can send you a private copy, PM me or something.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

3266's code for the (in-dev) offseason can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/frc3266/

No use releasing our competition code, since this is pretty much an overhaul of that.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

610's code (we use Java) is available on Google code. Note that it is not yet complete - the code we have changed since competition has not yet been uploaded - programmers need breaks too.

Our scouting system is written in PHP, and contains:
- The scouting form
- Access to the database as both HTML and Excel (.csv) tables
- Pick list assistant
- Easy access to stats for six teams (for match planning)
- A page for entering comments on robots, as well as the ability to flag a team as one that we do not work well with

It's currently not open source, but as soon as I finish explaining to one of our heads the important of open sourcing code, it will be.
I mention this because programming a robot is not that special - every team in FIRST does it. What we can learn from looking at someone else's code is not that extensive. However, everyone's scouting implentation (if it exists at all) will be completely different, and what can be learned from looking at that CAN be extensive.

Re: Please open source your code!
 

The DiscoBots have opened sourced our code for last two years.

It can be found here on Google Code - http://code.google.com/p/discobots/

We program in Java for FIRST and RobotC for VEX.