Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat
True, but I was a rookie this year, I had no problem learning... Just Look at the $@#$@#$@#$@# API and documents... How is that hard? If you have ANY programming experience, you can easily use the API, its so well named and stuff, I just asked what the things were connected to and Bam, its in the API... People don't realize how important reading documents and the API is... Also the mentors had a "Let all the students do all the work and just assist them" type of mentality, I can say they were great, but they did not needed to help me directly with coding. Just some of my questions on technology
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Concurred. This year we decided to code in Java, but 1) we coded in Labview last year, and lost the code, 2) none of the mentors knew how to program in Java, 3) the only dedicated programmer on the team last year was never here to help us. Another programmer and I had to figure EVERYTHING out ourselves, from installing the software to imaging the cRIO to deploying code, with no help from the mentors. (I'm sure they would have gone to the ends of the earth to help us if we asked; we just never asked because it wasn't necessary.) We managed to get this year's robot driving within half an hour of it being finished, and finish the kicker code, middle wheel code (see photos of our robot to see what I'm talking about), etc. within 2 days.
I'm obviously bragging, but I wouldn't call either myself or the other programmer geniuses. We're certainly not expert programmers either. We just looked online for examples, copied them, and then dug into the API for more info. That worked for everything except camera code, which was a pain in the rear end, but that's another story.