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Originally Posted by Ready_Mix
OMG that makes me realize just how little time we have.... Are you guys successful leaving programming until the end like that? We almost shot ourselves in the foot last year doing that.
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I agree with Ready_Mix. Being a team from Hawaii we usually don't get our kit of parts until the beginning of the second week, and then it takes a while for us to receive any other parts we order. In the past we have followed a strategy in which we start working hard on programming after we have a completed robot to test it on, which ends up being about a week before shipping. Last year this backfired on us: we were up until 4 AM on the eve of the ship date doing driver and autonomous program testing. At the regional none of our autonomous programming worked very reliably.
At today's brainstorming and organizational meeting one of my main agenda points was that we should have a team working on programming from the first few days. Our programming team is meeting with the programming mentor tomorrow night, in fact. The plan is to construct the FIRST chassis that comes with the kit of parts within 48 hours of kit arrival (probably next week Monday) so that the programming team can use it as a platform for familiarizing themselves with the new tools/system (I'm not a programmer so I don't know much about it) and figuring out how to use the new sensors.
I think that the way this six week breakdown assigns time for programming is a bad plan, especially for rookie teams who have students who are not as familiar with programming an FRC robot. Take a lesson from us Hawaiians and get the ball rolling on your software in the first week! It's one of the few things we can do in the first week, before the kit arrives, because we have access to the software tools right away.