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Unread 09-03-2011, 22:31
Radical Pi Radical Pi is offline
Putting the Jumper in the Bumper
AKA: Ian Thompson
FRC #0639 (Code Red Robotics)
Team Role: Programmer
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: New York
Posts: 655
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Re: Programming goofs!

Here's a story I heard from one of our mentors from 2002(??? whichever one had lunacy-style moveable goals):

We had this goal grabber-thing that twisted 90 degrees after being placed on one of the posts of the goal. Really cool, we managed to pull the entire opposing alliance around while they were all holding onto this same goal . But anyways, the grabber itself was powered by a motor and had limit switches to hold it at the ends. Well one day the programmer decides it would be a great idea to do some debugging by removing the limit switch code. The robot enables, and the thing spins out of control, catches on some of the electrical wires, and manages to tear up most of our electronics board!

Another story: Last year during elims at FLR, the head programmer decides to take one last shot at autonomous. He builds it, tests it on the cart tethered, and sends it out for a match, where the robot just sits there. Seeing that (again) it didn't work, he goes and removes autonomous from the code and redeploys. We go out for our next match, only to find that the robot successfully scores in autonomous!

And now for this year's autonomous mode: I had 5 minutes on the practice field at FLR to write autonomous before elims started. I'm sitting there, programming frantically, when I finish a download and go run autonomous. Well, the robot runs normally for about 1 second, after which it runs backwards in high gear at max speed! I practically kill the e-stop button, and the robot stops about 1 foot away from a rookie programmer! Turns out I forgot to tell the drive controller that it needed to send an update to the jaguars
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"To have no errors would be life without meaning. No strugle, no joy"
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