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Unread 04-04-2008, 17:30
Booksy Booksy is offline
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FRC #1244 (Viking Robotics)
Team Role: Programmer
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Rookie Year: 2007
Location: Great White North
Posts: 97
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Re: 2009 Control System Possibility?

I 100% agree with you(post 80) This year our team spent almost all of our time at the toronto regionals trying to fix the robot or change the programming to make it drivable(we did about 100 accidental donuts throughout the week because of our crazily un-drivable drive platform, but we managed to compete in every round) and our game layer cost a total of about $100 (made of copper tubing and pvc, this also won us the judges award) because we didn't have enough money, we didn't even have team uniforms (although that was more because of an unmotivated marketing team).

If the new control system was more expensive I can't imagine how we would manage to compete, we didn't last year at the current price.

Also, I learned C for this robot, which wasn't to bad because I am already proficient in other languages (python, java, etc.) which are similar, but I HATE easyC. I'm not sure why, it's supposed to be easy, you'd think that would be good right... however the real C code makes much more sense to me as it is not dumbed down, it is complete.

With all that being said, I would really like to see a new control system next year. We had a lot of trouble with the IR sensor. during hybrid mode the IR sensor would only except the first command or two and then take off into a wall. This doesn't really get solved with a new controller but the point is that a more plug and play version with less low level aspects would have allowed us to do some real good things with our robot other than drive, spin, crash. Isn't robotics about making things accomplish complex tasks? not making robots barely scrape by the easiest of tasks.

Last edited by Booksy : 04-04-2008 at 17:38.
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