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Originally Posted by Kris Verdeyen
No, I'm not. Allow me to elucidate my point:
Software development for one robot is software development for all similar robots.
Call it Verdeyen's law. Or the transitive property of code, whatever floats your goat.
It might sound hackneyed, but in software, unlike mechanical parts, the process is the product. Say your team troubleshoots drive code on your practice robot, and spends 100 hours trying different things that just... won't... work. Until, sometime around hour 110, someone sees the light, and realizes that you need to use Newtons instead of pounds, they already know the answer. So next week, when you go to competition, you're already 111 hours into the software development process, and you have the answer in your pocket. That's outside of both the spirit and the letter of the rule.
If you still think that's legal, then tell me where you would draw the line. Can the programmers bring the new code to the competition on a laptop, or does the code need to be on a disk? Or would it be better if they just had a printout of the code, and re-typed it? Maybe not the actual code, what if it was just a flowchart that showed them what they needed to write, and they re-wrote the actual functions from scratch?
If you don't draw the line at no robot software development, you have nowhere else to draw the line.
It seems to me that a lot of people are trying to read a lot less into the rule than what it says.
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So, say we build a seperate bot for practice. Something happens, we discover a single line of code is preventing us from using the entire thing (its disabling drive motors..).. We aren't allowed to fix that then? We have to sit there, knowing that we just wasted money, time, and effort building a 2nd bot, only to have it not be functional, and us not be able to fix it. I would hardly call that fair.
I don't like these new rules.. I'm wondering how many teams will have a sucessful auto mode at the first competition they have.. by the time you get there its too late to debug+test your code. (Well, maybe not too late, but where exactly would you be testing?) It doesn't make sense to me. Either allow practice robots, and modifying the code, or don't. This in-between stuff just seems to be causing more problems.