Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat
... just because they are a rookie team, that does not mean that they can't compete with he veterans... IDK where this idea came from, but I don't like the kit idea that people are doing. This is not some government run multi billion dollar project... Software pretty much costs $0 for us, its all electrical and mechanic that gobble up the money, I don't get how being under funded rookie has ANYTHING to do with programming...
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In my experience, your argument has a fundamental flaw: you imply that the disadvantage of being a rookie team is funding. To put it simply, it's not: several teams I know were better funded as rookies than as veterans. The veteran advantage is about experience.
Why does being a rookie have an affect on the mechanical, electrical, and other aspects of robot design? Because as a team grows older, they learn all kinds of things. They learn things about how to manipulate balls effectively, or how to optimize a drivetrain, or develop a set of methods for designing their electrical layout.
Software is no different. Teams learn how to write good drive control algorithms, use different sensors effectively, or create a strategy for writing autonomous mode software.
And it's not about code reuse: today, I can code a PID algorithm in five minutes flat. But it took me many hours of research and more than a few experiments before I really understood what was going on. Similarly, I spent many hours my rookie year developing a good 1-stick drive algorithm, but it's only a dozen lines of code. FIRST rules say I have to rewrite that every year - but that's trivial. The veteran advantage is not lines of code. It's knowledge.
I used to feel the way you do - that people were working to make programming easier, and I was going to lose my competitive advantage. I was wrong.
As a result, various libraries and frameworks and so forth can only be a good thing. It's not "babying" the rookie teams - effective tools raise the playing field for all of us.
For example, I could proclaim that the Linux command line is the true way, and that anyone who uses a GUI is a wimp. In fact, all the people working on GNOME, KDE, etc, are just showing pity to the clueless masses. The test of manhood is one's ability to rule the command line. It should be a matter of pride that you can use a computer. No! GUIs are useful software tools that have helped make computers mainstream, and have ushered in a whole host of applications. In the same way, higher-level robot functionality has the potential to bring in all kinds of innovations.