[Bethie42]

Originally Posted by RoBoTiCxLiNk

Haha, sounds awesome. My attempts at line following were with a chassis of last years bot on a tiled hallway and the little markings all over them ended up messing up the line sensors so much that it was impossible to write reliable code.

I had just seen that thread in the real time forum thing, and i immediately thought to myself "its C++ :/". I program in java, so i may not be able to find it if its a language specific problem.

and for our first regional, my mom needed the laptop i use to program for a conference she went to because her mac cant make databases, so i was stuck programming on the dinky driver station computer >.< the multi purpose netbook thing. still managed to get many things working though

Yeah, tiled hallways don't help... We have a little scrap of carpet from the local scrimmage in our shop and it's amazingly handy for both testing line-following and spread-eagling on to work on the robot! The aluminum shavings get into the seams a bit but oh well...

I discovered at our scrimmage that finding a bit of fabric or other material that simulates the carpet for testing in one's pit is surprisingly hard. Also our scrimmage had very pale grey tape lines...very nice high contrast, but not really what I expect at competition. Guess who's going down on the floor with the drive team with a screwdriver on day one to calibrate the light sensors.

Programming on the Classmate?! I applaud you. I don't have the patience to change default settings on that thing, lol, much less program on it...and the keys are so tiny. Try programming on a cell phone, I imagine it's about the same.
We are actually planning on taking our desktop computer, my personal PC laptop, and my Macbook to regionals. The desktop is a backup in case the laptop has the fabled 64-bit incompatibility with WindRiver, and the Mac is for scouting use. We did about the same last year, and got told by some scouting team that we had the most computers they'd seen in a pit...said something about that being a scouting criteria, which makes one wonder...

The original programming laptop didn't actually die....but WindRiver just...stopped compiling. It gets to 13% [on ANY program] and then just sits there indefinitely. We reinstalled and everything. It wasn't even particularly slow to begin with...