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Originally Posted by BurningQuestion
you might want to add that sometimes serial to usb converters are really tempermental. Alot of people have trouble with them.
Maybe recommend a certain kind that is known to be more reliable than others?
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If at all possible, get an actual serial port. USB to serial connections are usually not fun to deal with.
Comments are your friends. Use them, use them frequently, and use them intelligently. Try to document the code well enough so that someone who's never seen it before could understand it. There are certain things that you DON'T want to do - like, say, leaving excessive amounts of old code in the program but commented out, or copying and pasting
PBASIC (!) into the comment sections - but it can't hurt to use them in most cases.
Try to understand the basic framework of the code ahead of time. It would be nice to have your programming team know how to map the controls to the robot fuctions, or how to set up a basic autonomous mode.
Be prepared to deal with time constraints. My team gets the robot with less than two weeks to go most years, and it can be hard to do what you want before you ship. Even if other teams are more efficient in getting the robot to the programmers, you'll still have to worry about making sure that your code works and that you'll have enough time to fix what doesn't.
Most importantly...have fun. The programmers tend to get less credit than they deserve, but the robot wouldn't run if we weren't there.
