Programming teams

[RoBoTiCxLiNk]

I have been wondering this all season, but I wanted to get an idea of how many programmers there generally are on other teams. So if anyone wants to tell me how many programmers they have on their team, how they manage it, and what their main collaboration method is, I'd be very interested.

[Fireball9199]

We have 3 plus a mentor and we mainly use dropbox for collaboration.

[RoBoTiCxLiNk]

Our team has 1 programmer, who also does electronics, electrical, and mainly everything digital, and 0 mentors in the field of programming.

[BigJ]

We have anywhere from 2-3 mentors and 1-4 students on the control systems team any given year.

Right now we use Mercurial for version control with a repository on Bitbucket. However, it doesn't stay updated because the high school's network doesn't allow https connections to bitbucket, or something. I should talk to the IT guy at the school. However, Merciural is a good source control system when it comes to this, as a central repository is not required.

[Alexander Meyer]

We have three programming students and one software mentor. Currently we use Mercurial + BitBucket for source control.

[kgzak]

we have 3 programers and 1 mentor. This year we could have the potential to write the best code we have ever had but we haven't had a chance to get the robot.

[RoBoTiCxLiNk]

Originally Posted by kgzak

we have 3 programers and 1 mentor. This year we could have the potential to write the best code we have ever had but we haven't had a chance to get the robot.

Number 1 problem when programming: the builders dont recognize you as needed for the robot to run. They expect us to just program the whole bot and when THEYRE done, we just 'tweak' a few things and its miraculously running. The robot doesnt need to be built in 6 weeks, it needs to be built AND programmed. If i had had time with the 'bot', things wouldve gone much differently...

[kgzak]

Originally Posted by RoBoTiCxLiNk

Number 1 problem when programming: the builders dont recognize you as needed for the robot to run. They expect us to just program the whole bot and when THEYRE done, we just 'tweak' a few things and its miraculously running. The robot doesnt need to be built in 6 weeks, it needs to be built AND programmed. If i had had time with the 'bot', things wouldve gone much differently...

Exactly. What our team does is program something that should work and when we run it on the robot the first time and it doesn't work people get mad. This year our code is basically our code for our robot last year, so it really didn't advance as that much. Our autonomous is the only really new thing this year.

[RoBoTiCxLiNk]

Originally Posted by kgzak

Exactly. What our team does is program something that should work and when we run it on the robot the first time and it doesn't work people get mad. This year our code is basically our code for our robot last year, so it really didn't advance as that much. Our autonomous is the only really new thing this year.

Yea, i managed to get the robot working within a few hours of getting to our first regional. and that hour was spent updating netbeans to work with the updated cRIO that was updated literally probably the night before it left. What i was happy about this year was that we managed to salvage last years chassis and built an electronics board that could be taken on and off and used on either chassis, new or old. problems were that, while programs worked on one, no two robots are exactly alike.

[EHaskins]

We have one student who is also respnsible for all electrical and control system issues. I'm there as a mentor, but he knows what he's doing.

[kgzak]

Originally Posted by RoBoTiCxLiNk

Yea, i managed to get the robot working within a few hours of getting to our first regional. and that hour was spent updating netbeans to work with the updated cRIO that was updated literally probably the night before it left. What i was happy about this year was that we managed to salvage last years chassis and built an electronics board that could be taken on and off and used on either chassis, new or old. problems were that, while programs worked on one, no two robots are exactly alike.

Yeah, we attempted the same thing. we actually have 2 cRIOs but once the code goes on the other robot it still needs tweaking.

[Jeremy Germita]

We have 8 people on the subteam who CAN program.
4(Myself included) people who DO program.
These four usually do the control system stuff, also.
We have one mentor helping us in programming, one mentor keeping us focused .

For collaboration and version control, we use Subversion and Google Code(http://code.google.com/p/frc399-2011-code-james-bot/)

One thing that really annoyed me this build season is the delay in the robot completion. We give the manufacturing team 4 weeks to build it. They give it to us 3 days before ship. As soon as we plug in, they start bugging us. "Did you get it working yet??!?"
</rant>

[RoBoTiCxLiNk]

Originally Posted by kgzak

Yeah, we attempted the same thing. we actually have 2 cRIOs but once the code goes on the other robot it still needs tweaking.

Oh 2 cRIOs? lucky we just had to move the electronics board back and forth the few times i got to test the real robot out.

[RoBoTiCxLiNk]

Originally Posted by jeremypg399

We have 8 people on the subteam who CAN program.
4(Myself included) people who DO program.
These four usually do the control system stuff, also.
We have one mentor helping us in programming, one mentor keeping us focused .

For collaboration and version control, we use Subversion and Google Code(http://code.google.com/p/frc399-2011-code-james-bot/)

One thing that really annoyed me this build season is the delay in the robot completion. We give the manufacturing team 4 weeks to build it. They give it to us 3 days before ship. As soon as we plug in, they start bugging us. "Did you get it working yet??!?"
</rant>

I probably shouldn't keep responding to people's posts but this has happened to me both years i've programmed. Last year was worse though, for breakaway, we literally finished building the robot AT the regional. And our programming team can't make demands such as robot completion dates, 1 person vs. an entire team of builders doesnt go over to well. I'm content with occasionally using the robots chassis for motor testing and et cetera, but the other 99% of the time I'm just experimenting with sensor algorithms and new driver stations and systems. If i had the robot 2 weeks prior to ship i could have a flawless auton. but the bot would be less than flawless so i let them take care of that. And its always the same nagging with getting it to work as soon as theyre done, dont you love it

[DiscoKittyPrime]

We have two people on programming this year with one mentor. Last year we didn't have a mentor and it was my first year being the main programmer and we didn't get the robot to program until the friday of our first regional about two hours before our first match. We had the ability to test the code once after downloading it before it made it to the field which is why they had to drive the robot backwards the first match. We didn't get all the functionality finished until near the end of the regional because there was always something to be fixed on the robot.

This year went a little better. We essentially kidnapped last year's chassis and hoarded it for us to get programming work done and tested for the chassis along with the chassis allowed us to add more sensors. Some of the mentors were pushing to put our cRio on the robot two weeks before the end of build purely to have it on there and we pretty much had to stand our ground and hide away the cRio. When we got to competition, they realized how much better off we were as far as programming is concerned this year compared to last year because we had the base to program. Next year, we are keeping the entire robot together and using both the chassis from breakaway and the entire bot from this year for the programming team.

As far as code sharing, we only have a team laptop and the laptop of the programming mentor. We would work on code on the team laptop and then when we got that particular thing working, we would copy it over by emailing the text file and adding what was new into the actual program for the robot which was kept on the mentor's laptop and shared on a google docs that is owned by myself.