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Unread 19-02-2010, 13:43
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Jon Stratis Jon Stratis is offline
Electrical/Programming Mentor
FRC #2177 (The Robettes)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Rookie Year: 2006
Location: Minnesota
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Re: Who Has Programmed From Scratch?

Quote:
Originally Posted by TomBot View Post
Hardware always comes first. If your FRC software isn't required to be anything more than dumb, you will have a better robot. I guarantee it. Any software you develop means nothing if the hardware isn't reliable.
I would disagree with this - a good robot is designed with everything in mind. The best mechanism in the world isn't going to do anything unless programming can make it work. So many people (especially students, but it applies to mentors, too) in FIRST are completely focused on their own specific area - be it mechanical, programming, electrical, PR, scouting, driving, or whatever - they forget to step back and look at the big picture. You see this in industry, too - you may have 100 people working on a project, and everyone is completely focused on making their part perfect. If you don't have someone concerned about the big picture, you'll end up with 100 perfect parts that don't work well together.

Our team tries to solve that problem. We start with the big picture, and make sure everyone knows what we want the robot to be able to do. During the season, roughly ever other meeting we take the last 15 minutes for "show and tell" - we go around and everyone presents what they've accomplished. This gives everyone a chance to not only be exposed to other areas, but to provide thoughts when someone encounters a problem and to show off their accomplishments. We've managed to build some pretty sweet mechanisms over the past few years, put in place all the feedback that was needed, and write some fairly complicated code to get it all to work.

It's not software first, and it's not hardware first. It's robot first, and a robot is all that and more.