Theft hits Portland FRC Team 1432

[YAK'ker]

http://www.katu.com/news/local/Stole...297233311.html

There's a link on the team's website, if you would like to donate to help them out.

Brings up a question - how do other teams back up their robot's programming?

[asid61]

Github works for us.
I hope they can get things working.

[DarkRune]

Team 4159 uses GitHub. They offer a free private repos to FRC teams, though public repos work just as well. Excellent place to push code to. Let's multiple people work on the code together, with built in version control. It also keeps track of the changes in case something doesn't work you can go and pull the old version.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by YAK'ker

Brings up a question - how do other teams back up their robot's programming?

Commit early, commit often.

This is certainly one of the toughest ways to learn the value of version control that I'm aware of.

[Whippet]

Originally Posted by YAK'ker

Brings up a question - how do other teams back up their robot's programming?

We Dropbox everything we do. I've heard great things about GitHub, but we've never taken the time to set it up.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Whippet

We Dropbox everything we do. I've heard great things about GitHub, but we've never taken the time to set it up.

Learn it now - you'll soon wonder how you ever got anything done without it. It's a 10x multiplier on your productivity especially if you work with others. Using Dropbox for code is just...not the way to do it.

[YAK'ker]

ironic, I just ran across those insanely cute GitHub stickers in our FRC packet o' stuff today and thought "wow" this looks like something we should be using. Glad to hear others felt it was useful, we will check it out.

[SousVide]

terrible news for #1432, hope they recover well.

Our team use github as well. You can start with your code in a private repos and then change the repos to a public one once you are ready to publish it - before the end of the season.

[one4robots]

Originally Posted by Whippet

We Dropbox everything we do. I've heard great things about GitHub, but we've never taken the time to set it up.

We have used both Dropbox and Github. Github is well worth the switch due to the built in version control. We do still use Dropbox for CAD though.

[asid61]

Originally Posted by one4robots

We have used both Dropbox and Github. Github is well worth the switch due to the built in version control. We do still use Dropbox for CAD though.

For CAD we use GrabCAD now. It has an online web viewer for Solidworks files and has really good conflict control (1 conflicted copy this whole year) as well as version control. We used Dropbox two years ago and got tons of conflicted copies due to inexperienced people opening and saving files, especially when at home. It was livable and can work as long as precautions are taken, but I like GrabCAD more.

[Fauge7]

Sorry to hear this! If your team needs any help I am sure team 3019 would be more then willing to help! as for backing up the code use github and upload working code to a flash drive. That way you have a physical copy and a cloud copy. REMEMBER: The more places the better!

hope things end up all right!

[orangemoore]

The situation sounds very unfortunate.

Google drive/Dropbox or some other cloud based storage is probably the best way to save code. Currently we use labview and if we were programming with another language we would most likely use github.
This is a reminder for me to upload our code.

[Sperkowsky]

We use github also. I'm not trying to offend the news people but to our team coding simple driving (tank mecanum omni ect) is something that take max 20 minutes and to program the lift another maybe 15. If that's not everyone I feel bad and we will help but it shouldn't be an issue for them to come back easily. I'd be more mad they just lost a 500-1000 piece of hardware.

[dtengineering]

A USB key of "known good" software taped to the driver station.

Github, Dropbox, Google Drive... none of them will help if you drop your laptop half-way through re-programming your robot, while you're standing in the queueing line.

With a flash drive and a helpful alliance partner, you at least stand a chance to set things right.

Jason

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

We use github also. I'm not trying to offend the news people but to our team coding simple driving (tank mecanum omni ect) is something that take max 20 minutes and to program the lift another maybe 15. If that's not everyone I feel bad and we will help but it shouldn't be an issue for them to come back easily. I'd be more mad they just lost a 500-1000 piece of hardware.

True, but in the stress of competition.. You're right though, assuming a fairly standard drive train and mechanisms, it would not take long to take the sample robot code and turn it into a basic driving robot. You would lose your autonomous code and any mechanism state machines though.

Originally Posted by dtengineering

A USB key of "known good" software taped to the driver station.

Github, Dropbox, Google Drive... none of them will help if you drop your laptop half-way through re-programming your robot, while you're standing in the queueing line.

Yes, my backup strategy would be, GitHub for all development, then a USB stick with the code, and a backup laptop.

GitHub works well but there is a bit of a learning curve, especially when multiple people are working in the same repo at the same time. People fork their own and make their changes and then make pull requests, but they should also pull often to keep theirs up to date. It takes some time to get used to the concept of version control, branches, forks, pushes, pulls, etc.

We were at a point in my team where the kids got in the habit of calling "MERGE!" when they were committing code. Everyone else in the room would yell it back, like a herd of mooing cattle. When we voted to name our robot, "MERGE" got second place!