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Unread 04-05-2012, 11:25
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Re: TEST Einstein BEFORE the BIG-show... here's a proposed approach...

Quote:
Originally Posted by DjScribbles View Post
Here's what I don't quite get... you don't need a robot or a bunch of teams to test it; that just opens the door to brushing off any problems as being the fault of the participant.

I think the field should include 6 (maybe less for cost reasons I guess) CRIO's hooked up to 6 radios, configured as imaginary team numbers 9996-9999. Program each CRIO in a different language and fit it with some basic code (or maybe exhaustive code using alot of functions as a 'test') and these boxes become the gold standard.

If a field has issues, hookup the boxBots, if they don't work then you know it's the field; if they do work then that gives the field personel a little more certainty that the field is not at fault.

It's a bit of an expensive solution to start, but these can be used multiple years with fairly minimal maintenance, and it removes a variable from the equation, because it's easy to blame the robot/team that had problems.
There's a bunch of issues with testing radio issues at these frequencies.

The orientation of the robots matters.
The 3D locations of the robots matters.
The sort of traffic you are trying to push through matters.
The internal designs of the robots and radio placements matter.
What the radios can and cannot do, like disable 2.4GHz fully matters.
Even the projectiles on the field, and the people near it matter.

The trick would be to basically create good approximations of the robots.
The difficulty is knowing what those approximations should look like.

Otherwise the mock robots pigeon hole you into making your design more like theirs or you are back to the bad design example. Worse it's expensive.

At this point you may as well drive the robots you have with the teams that brought them. They gain experience and you can see if there's a little gotcha coming that a straight simple field test didn't show.

Last edited by techhelpbb : 04-05-2012 at 11:27.
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