[Necroterra]

Originally Posted by gblake

Help me out folks, if a team's software isn't made public, isn't it supposed to be rewritten from scratch every year?

And even if all of a team's software is made public from year to year, isn't the general notion of the annual FRC learning experience that software, like the physical robot, will be largely developed anew, during the season, each year?

I realize that there is a broad spectrum is ways teams actually do their software development; but isn't the clean sheet of paper, plus some true of the shelf code, short-of the big picture thrust of the rules?

I'm pretty sure that you are right and all reused code is supposed to be public. I think a lot of teams throw it on their website or a github repo, but it isn't under a easy to find name. However, it is also really hard to enforce this rule and it usually isn't that big of a deal, so it gets ignored as far as I know.

I don't see why you would ever start completely from scratch - things such as path planning, vision code, state machines, interfaces, dashboard tools, etc. can be developed and refined over years, and generally can't be done well in 6 weeks. Re-deriving your algorithms every year might be a learning experience, but it won't teach you as much as refining and expanding your codebase will.

I think that there are some situations where following this rule and being an effective FRC programmer don't necessarily align. Here are a few theoretical examples where the rule is technically broken.

1. I wrote a spline generator in the offseason / last year, and copy pasted it into my project this year without putting it on Github. This is technically against the rules, but at least the student is still learning.
2. I had my friend / parent / mentor give me a spline generator they wrote for college, and copy pasted it without making it public. This is bad, since you neither shared it nor wrote code yourself.
3. I opened my code from last year, and used it as a reference for how I did certain things such as getting joystick inputs. This to me is fine, since while you might retype certain lines verbatim, a single line or method call barely counts as code - in this case, really you are just not having to look things up in the documentation as much.

I love reading code, especially elegant and concise code. I think I'll make an off season "competition" of a code standard challenge from the team's code this year. I'll begin working on the details tomorrow with a friend and anyone else who is interested.

I would love this, so would it be like you provide a description of the robot and it's sensors / components, and people submit code that should make it run?