Knowledge Base for Current Control?

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by carrillo694

In sum, documentation for the items you seek exists, but is not perfectly centralized or communicated. The wpilib project on firstforge.wpi.edu is a good starting point, though.

Bingo !! - It is not small undertaking trying to explain all of this to a group of semi-veteran or rookie teams.

We just tried to train about a dozen rookie and semi-vets. Extremely challenging. Telling them to just go to usfirst.org or firstforge.wpi.edu or just google around isn't sufficient.

Personally I know and our team knows where all of this stuff is and how to do it. The problem is centralizing it and organizing it into a friendly easy to approach fashion.

The java and windriver examples are a little random and not really progressive. It isn't such a problem if you have plenty of software mentors (adult or student) but a lot of teams struggle to see the big picture.

Our students have held a lot of workshops teaching java and windriver where they have the pupils learn how to add controls and sensors in a progressive fashion. But it is in our head and not "out there" on the net for people to see.

I don't think we need something as fancy as CMU's robotC curriculum but that would be nice. If we can just have a central landing site that hosts or points to all the useful stuff that would be great. It would best be managed by someone and not just an upload site. Otherwise it turns into a morass of stuff that a lot of people are not going to dig through.

And we probably need a pages with a bunch of title/links to "how do I ....".

In summary we probably need:

1) centralized information map pointing or linking to everything you every wanted to know
2) HOWTO's
3) cirriculum

The curriculum may never get done. Big project, should look like CMU's stuff

I don't know if they still exist but there use to be a ton of HOWTO documents for linux app and linux kernel developers that was a compendium of probably answered questions, sitting in a central location.

Supporting a ton of teams is very tough and we a trying to hold them off until after the Championship and then we can spend from here to kickoff getting them up to speed.

Too much of it tends to be a verbal "here is where to do and how to find it". It almost reminds me of pre-history before the written word was invented and societies were oral and all history and knowledge was transmitted orally. I used to work with someone that grew up in Côte d'Ivoire under that type of knowledge transfer. In America when someone tells you a story it takes three minutes. Onetime this guy started a story at 2:30 pm on day and was still telling it at 11pm that night. But that is typical in Côte d'Ivoire. But I digress.

If you go to the bottom left corner of ChiefDelphis's home page there is "Useful Links" section. That is good news ! It is also bad news !

A lot of stuff, not really cataloged by sections. Plus big stuff like WPI isn't even there. And there are pages that just copy someone elses page instead of linking to it. The problem with copying instead of linking is the owner of the data cannot propagate changes locally.

Back before most of you were born we had something called a card catalog. You could look up information by author, title, or subject.

Instead of the marginally useful "Useful Links" section, If you could tree down starting with the subject of robot-->programming-->C or Java, or Labview-->then whatever you needed, like dashboard..

That would be useful..
.