[kamocat]

Back at the Portland Regional in 2009 I was working on a basic autonomous: go forward a ways, and then spin until the end of autonomous.
(I had some 'fire on trailers' code too, but the coach asked me not to enable it because it wasn't well-tested)

Anyways, I think there were problems with it not turning soon enough, and for some reason I decided to use a "delay and feed" on the user watchdog to see if that was the problem. What ended up happening was the wheels didn't stop after 15 seconds. Or when we "disabled" the robot. As far as we knew, they didn't stop until we physically shut the robot off. (I can make speculations from memory, but the why isn't so important in this case)

So I fixed that and was ready to test again, and then these two guys from another team came over and wanted to help. This is where GP comes in.
I wasn't really interested in their help, but I wasn't sure how to communicate it, so I went along with it.
The first thing they said was that a Case Structure was a loop, and that's where the program was getting caught up, so I needed to use a local variable to pass data out of it.
I had been working with LabVIEW for over 6 months at that point. I wasn't sure how they got that idea. I told them it wasn't, I made an example VI to show that it wasn't, and it wasn't until I spent 5 minutes with my head in my hands wondering how I could explain this to them in a way that they would get it, that they remembered what a case structure actually was (an "if...else" statement) and then left.


SO I tried to be gracious and professional, and I ended up wasting 15 minutes that I could have spent working. Perhaps I was slightly too gracious.


What should I have done?