I'm defnitely in on this one. This year I was a rookie FIRST programmer (I have a fair bit of outside experience), and more or less first year with the robot (last year I did only design at the beginning, then left). I can not begin to explain the amount of time that it took for me to get through the default code and figure out how to get it onto the robot and how to set up deadbands (I hadn't found CD at that point). This completely destroyed the window that I had for debugging the vision system, and that ended that.
So I wholeheartedly agree that such a guild would be a phenomenal idea. Unfortunately I won't be at nats this year (I couldn't keep the date free, will be there next year), but if there is anything that you guys need (I run a hosting service with my own dedicated servers and could offer up space/bandwidth/cvs/whatever if you guys need it, unless you have something). Next year I was planning on doing an independent study in embedded systems (aka FIRST robotics programming
), and I should be working on a number of proof of concepts and code tidbits.
I would suggest that the code repository is mainly pseudo-code, with the really complicated parts perhaps being written out in C. This way rookie programmers can start to get an idea what programming is all about by more or less writing their own code, not just by inserting missign bits and pieces in a template.
I'd really like to see the quality of code loaded on most robots include, and I think that the FPG is a step in the right direction.