FRC Blogged - Frank Answers Fridays: August 30, 2013

[techhelpbb]

With respect to Matt I saw plenty of confusion about versions last year.
As a CSA last year was the first time I actually felt confident I knew for certain which versions were utimately the 'gold' versions for the competition.
Only because I had official instruction prior to arrival on the field.

Although I know the information is scattered about I wonder sometimes how effectively the bugs and reasons for modifications are being communicated.

I can say for certain that from start to finish to install: all the development software and updates, Microsoft Updates for Windows 7 (drawn off my local Microsoft Update server at WiFi-N speeds) and generally prepare a laptop for last year it took more than 10 hours. For teams that do this 3 or 4 hours a night I can see the better part of a week spent getting the show on the road. Let alone dealing with the eventual updates and that's not potentially installing SolidWorks and/or Inventor (which is not fast to install even on my SSD because of the shear size). Never mind that as of now there are some issues apparently installing Inventor (with Microsoft Office 365 & 13) for some people. Though I do recognize that both SolidWorks and Inventor are available to teams right now surely some people will wait until kickoff to install those programs.

If the ultimate goal was really to float into production a work environment from the second of roll out I wonder if distributing some sort of virtual machine pre-configured would be more sensible. Not to mention potentially easier to support.

[apalrd]

I submitted a comment to the original FRC blog post asking:

Which software modules contain game-specific elements:
FRC Imaging tool and images
FRC Driver Station and Dashboard
LabVIEW and WindRiver (not even FRC specific)
LabVIEW/language updates

I believe the game-specific software in the past has been just the vision examples in the language updates, which really should move to their own place anyway.