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Originally Posted by Abrakadabra
Most of the IFI lovers seem to be multi-year veterans who most likely had good, knowledgeable mentors who could teach them the mysteries of that system and how to maximize its potential. They came to know it and love it and still wonder why anyone would need anything else. They may think it was "bulletproof", but what they often forget is that it was a very daunting platform for most kids who were probably encountering their first embedded programming platform, usually without any kind of expert guidance, and certainly with very little entry-level documentation.
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What are you talking about? The 2004 IFI control control system documentation was absolutely amazing. It gave nearly perfect instructions for exactly how to set things up from a starting point of zero knowledge. It came with well-documented default code and a comprehensive guide to how -- and why -- that code worked. There were no mysteries (except perhaps for the existence of the LimitMix() function).
I had extensive email conversations a few years ago with a mentor who was frustrated by what he perceived as a lack of information on how to use the IFI system. The true problem was that he didn't know where to find it, as it wasn't obvious to him that prior years' documentation was still valid. As soon as he started asking questions that made it clear he hadn't read what was available, I pointed him to it and he got much happier.
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Until Kevin Watson came along and cleaned up the code and wrote a little documentation, most ordinary teams were lucky to just get a drivable platform working.
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Kevin created very nice drop-in modules with complete instructions for how to add them to the default code and how to use them. He eventually wrote his own powerful framework around which to build a sophisticated robot-controlling program. But the default code would do a great job of running a driveable platform, and it would even run pneumatics and limit-switch-controlled motors without modification. All the "ordinary team" needed to do was read the instructions describing which joystick inputs controlled which RC outputs.
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And forget about a mere mortal getting any kind of camera image processing working!
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The CMUcam did its own image processing. The only programming required on the IFI system was for communicating with the camera...and it was in the default code that year.