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Unread 07-03-2006, 00:33
Keith Watson Keith Watson is offline
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FRC #0957 (WATSON)
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Rookie Year: 2006
Location: Wilsonville, OR
Posts: 112
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Re: Camera does not search in autonomous mode after reset

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Watson
Sure, on large, complex systems with lots of resources you'd instrument the code or HDL to catch such cases. Instrumenting a very simple state machine that cannot (by inspection) have an invalid state, in a resource constrained system where code readability is of paramount importance, doesn't make sense to me.
After working with many experienced software engineers over the years I can confirm that many experienced software engineers have that same opinion. Yet just the camera.c and tracking.c files have 11 debug statements. One of those is implemented in a state machine and is called 18 times.

For all the high school programmers watching out there, creating robust software systems is an important consideration in software design, even in a resource limited machine. I have programmed on much smaller systems than the IFI. Just because you think certain conditions should not happen does not mean that they never will.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Watson
If the static state variable isn't getting initialized at boot time, a wonky state machine is the least of your worries .
I know. I will persue it until I can track down the error we observed.
__________________
Keith Watson - Professional Software Engineer
No relation to "Kevin" Watson, who created the camera tracking code.