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Unread 21-01-2011, 00:18
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Re: why blame the programmers??

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Originally Posted by TD912 View Post
Ugh, as a former programmer and head of Electrical for my team, I remember being crunched for time as Mechanical would take their time building things and wait until the last few days to assemble everything, leaving me with only a few days to properly code and test everything.
You got a few days to test?

Luxury...
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Unread 21-01-2011, 01:29
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Re: why blame the programmers??

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Originally Posted by davidalln View Post
You got a few days to test?

Luxury...
lol! Thanks for that laugh!


We aren't on-schedule unless the programmers are programming AT the regional. No earlier, no later.
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Unread 21-01-2011, 01:32
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Re: why blame the programmers??

Programmers have the pleasure of not being on the same time frame in a way. Yeah you need basic code to make sure components work but our magic comes from the time we have to ourselves after ship and the opening day of regionals. I did a majority of the programming after ship and day one of boilermaker. Especially if you are new I would recommend seeking help during day one at regionals from other teams or the volunteers!
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Unread 21-01-2011, 02:38
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Re: why blame the programmers??

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidalln View Post
You got a few days to test?

Luxury...
Quote:
Originally Posted by synth3tk View Post
lol! Thanks for that laugh!


We aren't on-schedule unless the programmers are programming AT the regional. No earlier, no later.
If you consider 1 or 2 days "a few"... I would get some basic code done, make sure it somewhat worked, then work on it some more after the robot was shipped. Then I usually spent the first day of the regional fixing bugs on-the-fly between practice matches. Even then the code wasn't that great.

Luckily it seems like my team has gotten it together this year and is finally making sure they give the programmers enough time to write and test code.
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Last edited by TD912 : 21-01-2011 at 02:40.
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Unread 21-01-2011, 09:02
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Re: why blame the programmers??

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Luckily it seems like my team has gotten it together this year and is finally making sure they give the programmers enough time to write and test code.
Every team I've ever been on (2003, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011 so far) has said that. I've never had the competition robot for more than a couple days before ship. Every year, it's "this will be the year the robot is ready for the programmers a week early", and every year it's "oh sorry, we need to adjust this widget or slightly rebuild this whatzit, so you can't program with the full robot".

You can certainly do most of the basic control stuff without the robot (or with a previous-years robot) and we often do, but if you're using any sensors more complicated than a limit switch, tuning things (autonomous/PIDs/vision/linetrackers) is impossible.
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Unread 21-01-2011, 09:33
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Re: why blame the programmers??

It might seem strange to some, but I already wrote almost all of the base code for this year. We know what we are building and what it will do, so I can write all of the software and debug it in a simulated environment, then spend a few days tuning the robot control loops and fixing robot-specific issues.

It helps to have a chassis to work with. You can most certainly work on drive code, automation, and vision on just a chassis. Even if you have to re-tune some of the code for the real robot, simply knowing that the algorithm works as you wanted to, and finding the 10% of cases where the code dosen't work as expected (and fixing them) can be a great help.
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Unread 21-01-2011, 10:45
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Re: why blame the programmers??

During a couple of years, the TechnoKats build schedule included explicit "programming has priority" time one evening each week. No mechanical work was to be done on the robot that evening, except for repairs when the software broke something. It worked out pretty well.

This year we dug our 2007 practice 'bot chassis out of the robot graveyard hall of fame, replaced a couple of wheels, and wired it up with a cRIO control system. It's a perfect software playground. I'm a little worried that this year's competition 'bot won't be ready for wiring up anytime soon, but as soon as it is, we'll have software ready to go.
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