Quote:
Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe
On top of a lot (probably most) teams not having a programming mentor of some sort, I would venture to say that most of the programming mentors out there have no formal training in controls.
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That's actually a good point. I suppose there are a couple of ways to look at FRC robots. One is as a control system problem. I'm not sure many teams take the approach to look at their robots in that light. I think that has a lot to do with why LabView is often shunned by some. LabView is an absolutely amazing tool for programming control systems...
All this talk of optimization is great but I haven't seen anyone in this thread talk about profiling. It's been a while since I took the compiler optimization class that I took in college but as I recall, there were some choice readings by Donald Knuth that pointed out that pre-mature optimization is the root of all evil or something similar. Profiling helps to determine where to optimize systems and with FRC robots containing a physical component, profiling would entail looking at the code as well as the robots output and the speed/efficiency of motors and gearboxes... which as others have pointed out, is more likely to provide substantial efficiency gains.