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Unread 08-10-2012, 10:41
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Jon Stratis Jon Stratis is offline
Electrical/Programming Mentor
FRC #2177 (The Robettes)
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Re: Preventing "Garbage In, Garbage Out" in FRC

Most often, it's not the software teams use that makes a difference - it's the process the team goes through. Two examples:

A few years ago, we built a mecanum drive train on one of our robots. When it came time to program it, it would have been really easy to use the built in mecanum module and call it a day. However, rather than do that, we pulled over a white board, and went over how it all works. As a team, we came up with two separate algorithms that should work, and implemented them (along with the built in one). We handed it to the drivers to try out, and while they picked the built in one as being easiest to use, the team learned how it actually worked, instead of just plugging it in.

Last season before we started building anything, we went over every allowed motor (except the ARA donation). We talked about what the values meant and how you can use them to determine which motor to use for which application. As a result, we only burned out 1 motor, and that was in an unanticipated situation that wouldn't occur on the field (a 50 ft ethernet cable we used as a tether got caught in one of our shooter wheels). Compare this to the previous year, where we burned out a half dozen or so FP motors and countless minibot motors. We didn't do the same level of training on motors that previous year.


When building a robot, you don't have the time to dive into the specifics of every aspect. But if you take the time to dive into some aspects and show the students how some of the important decisions are made, it'll help them to understand and apply the process to other decisions later on in life.
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