Our 2014 robot source code

[smarthimandrew]

Here is every piece of code our team wrote over the course of last year.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fu1elhc5yukg9ea/1rtfuAdq3w

I am posting this per section R16 of the 2013 game manual.

No promises as to the quality or readability of the code, this is something we hope to do better this year.

Disclaimer:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

(Disclaimer credit "The JSON license" http://www.json.org/license.html)

[Bryce Paputa]

You coded 2014's robot already? Can I see the game manual? </sarcasm>

[Jon Stratis]

This does seem to meet the letter of the rule. I want to ask the CD public what they feel of the spirit of the rule, though... This doesn't feel like a posting for a library of code for use on a robot - like the example provided of a library for controlling an onmi-directional drive system. This is the code for a specific robot.

Im my opinion, a posting meeting the spirit of the rule would include everything. Design files for the mechanism the library is controlling, description for other teams trying to use it, and the code for it. The post would say something along the lines of "Hey everyone, look at this awesome thing we developed and are making available to you! Let us know if you have any questions or feedback so we can make it better for everyone!"

I really don't want to harp on the OP, but this is a posting noting the letter of the rule and dumping the entire developed last year out there with no description or effort to improve the community. Literally every team could make a post like this and make the 2013 R16 completely non-applicable to software by doing so. Looking at it form that extreme, it would seem that using the rule this way would simply be punishing those teams who failed to post, not enhancing the capabilities of the community.

The art of developing a comprehensive software library for some specific purpose is something that can greatly benefit the students on a team (and the community as a whole), and something that I believe FIRST wants to encourage. At the same time, however, FIRST wants to ensure the students on a team are doing new work each year, and not just riding on the coattails of previous efforts. This is something that is easy to do with physical parts, but software isn't physical, which makes it difficult to quantify sometimes. It's something our entire system (justice, patent, copyright, etc) has had a difficult time coming to terms with over the past 30 years.

[Bryce Paputa]

I view it from the perspective that if the code isn't documented, then future years will have trouble understanding it too. I haven't actually looked at OP's code, this may or may not apply to him, but I believe that any documentation made for the private team needs to be included with the public code version. It sounds like OP's code wasn't ever well documented, making this a non-issue, documenting it would probably help them even more than us.

[smarthimandrew]

Allow me to clarify my team's intentions in this matter. Several of our programmers have been programming since before FIRST. We like to be able to look at our old code, and build on top of it for our next project.

After reading section R16 - which seems to allow this under the condition that all teams be able to use our old code also - we decided to post it all just to be safe. Due to the fact that we have no way of knowing which algorithms we will need to use this year, we put up everything we had - just in case.

My team has no intention of mass "copy - pasting" our code into our current robot. In fact, it seems unlikely that we will use our old code much at all.

Originally Posted by Bryce Paputa

I view it from the perspective that if the code isn't documented, then future years will have trouble understanding it too. I haven't actually looked at OP's code, this may or may not apply to him, but I believe that any documentation made for the private team needs to be included with the public code version. It sounds like OP's code wasn't ever well documented, making this a non-issue, documenting it would probably help them even more than us.

Yes, you're right. We definitely need to improve on our documentation. This is something that our team struggled with last year, and something we will work on in the coming season.

As for posting all of our documentation, this is it. The intent of this post was to hold nothing back. All teams now have access to everything we do. There is no private documentation that we are withholding.

I do agree however, that a giant dump of everything we developed may simply increase confusion surrounding what we wrote. This is unfortunate as our goal is simply to "cover all the bases" so that we will be fine under next year's set of rules.