Team 254 Presents: CheesyVision

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by DjScribbles

I just wanted to post back and say I got the C++ port up and running (with minimal changes).

https://github.com/FirstTeamExcel/Ro...sionServer.cpp

Feel free to shamelessly steal the code, but I'd love to hear if it helps anyone out.

Have you tested this on a robot? If so I can add it to the repo.

Also it doesn't look like you have a runner thread within the object. Are you running it externally? If so could you post that code as well?

[Gregor]

Thank you very much for posting this. Within an hour of showing this to our programmer, we had it fully operational with our 1 ball.

[DjScribbles]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

Have you tested this on a robot? If so I can add it to the repo.

Also it doesn't look like you have a runner thread within the object. Are you running it externally? If so could you post that code as well?

Yes, we've got the code up and running, it is working great. I can try to put together an example project to wrap the vision server code on Monday or so.

The object implements a thread for reading from the IO stream by inheriting from jankyTask, the Run method is the wrapped threading function.

[TravSatEE]

I think it is very kind of your team to post this publicly. The use of a built-in camera on the driver station is a very good choice for getting a human in the loop and you've sparked some thinking for Chief Delphi that will last for seasons to come.

After looking through the posted code repository, I have to ask: what is Team 254's philosophy on student involvement? The two contributors on github appear to be your mentors and the level of programming skill is also not commonly found in high school students. Have I missed the student involvement in this?

I'm not making any sort of accusation that Team 254 has done something wrong or is not following rules. I am just surprised that for a high school competition the high-visibility work from your team seems to be mentor-only. I believe the announcer at Silicon Valley said that Team 254 won the regional for 15 of the last 16 years. This is impressive and clearly your team is doing something that ensures a solid victory record.

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by TravSatEE

After looking through the posted code repository, I have to ask: what is Team 254's philosophy on student involvement? The two contributors on github appear to be your mentors and the level of programming skill is also not commonly found in high school students. Have I missed the student involvement in this?

I'm not making any sort of accusation that Team 254 has done something wrong or is not following rules. I am just surprised that for a high school competition the high-visibility work from your team seems to be mentor-only. I believe the announcer at Silicon Valley said that Team 254 won the regional for 15 of the last 16 years. This is impressive and clearly your team is doing something that ensures a solid victory record.

Having had the opportunity to interact with Team 254 over the years, and especially this season, I can assure you that both high and low visibility work on their team is far from mentor only. The students are involved and integrated throughout their entire process. The strength of their partnerships is not only evidenced by their unparalleled victory record, but also by their place in the FIRST Hall of Fame as a Championship Chairman's Award Winning team.

[TravSatEE]

Originally Posted by Karthik

I can assure you that both high and low visibility work on their team is far from mentor only. The students are involved and integrated throughout their entire process.

I asked the Team 254 mentors what the involvement is on this particular project by the students with interest in their broader philosophy on the matter. Indeed in their other public repositories the students have contributed and from seeing them in competition, I know that the students are involved. However, I don't see any obvious indicators for the CheesyVision that students were involved. The workmanship makes it apparent to a casual observer as to who did the work. I believe that I asked an earnest question that they can answer. I am just surprised that the student involvement was not overwhelmingly apparent on this one project given they are such a substantial team (as you also indicated).

[Jared Russell]

This was forked from our teams' FRC 2014 repository just for public release. It is different from what we competed with last weekend (it removed some team-specific features, streamlined some quick hacks, and added a ton of comments). Mentors went over the code with a fine-toothed comb before making it public. This was deliberate.

While our students are intricately involved in our teams' software (more on this below), we are talking about releasing code to the entire FIRST community DURING the competition season. A fairly high bar is required for teams to be able to understand, use, and trust the code in time for their next competition - we certainly don't want to be breaking other teams' robots. I personally made (and stand behind) the decision to go mentor heavy on this particular project for this reason. (To be clear, I fully believe that our students could have made just as polished a product, but I thought that an expedient release would be ultimately more important.)

It might be software, but this is just another COTS module that you can choose to use (or ignore). Like an AM Shifter or a VEXpro VersaPlanetary, I believe that putting a high quality component in the hands of a student is a vehicle for inspiration.

Originally Posted by TravSatEE

However, I don't see any obvious indicators for the CheesyVision that students were involved. The workmanship makes it apparent to a casual observer as to who did the work.

This is a dangerous line of thinking for two reasons.

First, never judge a book by its cover. Every year I am amazed at what students are capable of. This year, there are some very gifted programmers on 254. They wrote a RESTful webserver on our cRIO (that ultimately provided the TCP server part of CheesyVision). One of them - and this still absolutely blows my mind to think about - designed and implemented a quintic spline trajectory planner for our autonomous driving routine. I explained the basic concept, then sat back as he did the math, derived the differential equations, and gave me working code. Just awesome.

Second reason: An anecdote. One of my earliest posts on Chief Delphi was in this thread. It was 2003, and WildStang had just posted about StangPS, a really sophisticated navigation system that I was sure had to be engineer-built (just look at my posts!). I was a senior in high school at the time. I thought my gyro-based autonomous mode was pretty nifty, but was blown away by StangPS. I watched their video dozens of times, enthusiastically emailed it to my programming mentor at the time, and was just totally fascinated with it. I ended up reading about odometry and dead reckoning, using interrupts to read optical encoders, Kalman filters, and all sorts of other concepts that I didn't fully understand as a high schooler, but found really, really cool.

While at the time I was a little peeved that here I was, a high school student writing all of 341's code while these other teams had teams of engineers, in hindsight I cannot thank 111 enough for raising the bar and for sharing what they did. I was inspired and in some permanent and positive way, my life was shaped by it. While a little Python script for processing a webcam image is by no means as impressive as complete robot navigation system, my hope is that at least a few students will give it a look and see something they think is cool and want to learn more about later.

[TravSatEE]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

First, never judge a book by its cover.

I did not judge the book by the cover. At the Madera regional, my team stayed at the same hotel as Team 254. On Friday night, one of your students interacted with my students and said that being on your team isn't as much fun because of the work done by the mentors. This was told to me the next day and I was surprised by a comment like that about such a highly regarded team. Seeing your CD post this weekend, I decided to investigate for myself.

I had expected that your project was forked and that was why I asked for clarification as to what the students did. Instead, your answer wasn't completely clear to me as to exactly what the students did for CheesyVision. I do understand that it was "mentor heavy." Though you couldn't tell the differences between student and mentor effort when you were in high school, I trust my judgment because I have done programming for 18 years and know the subtle differences in programming skills at all levels. I do think very highly of the work you released to all teams. I am sure students also do.

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

It might be software, but this is just another COTS module that you can choose to use (or ignore). Like an AM Shifter or a VEXpro VersaPlanetary, I believe that putting a high quality component in the hands of a student is a vehicle for inspiration.

Your analogy to a COTS part is not equivalent to this situation: several mentors appear to have worked exclusively on a project that was used to give a competitive advantage to the game performance given limitations of the Field Management System. Albeit it was not an overwhelming advantage and any team could have done the exact same thing. Again, I am not saying Team 254 has broken any rules. But I find it interesting that a NASA sponsored (funded?) team, and the team with the best winning record of FIRST, needs to have mentors do exactly what you have done for a high school competition. Of course you stand by your decision to do CheesyVision the way that you did -- it's easy to stand by a decision that has no consequences.

I am eminently fortunate to always have mentored teams that were student run and each team has students just as impressive as the ones you described. From what I have learned today, I think the difference between your team and my teams is that other mentors keep it students vs students.

I do not intend for any of my posts to put you on the defensive nor to diminish your students' work hard. I am trained to speak my mind and your reply has been informative. Thank you for answering.

[AGPapa]

Originally Posted by TravSatEE

Your analogy to a COTS part is not equivalent to this situation: several mentors appear to have worked exclusively on a project that was used to give a competitive advantage to the game performance given limitations of the Field Management System.

How can you possibly claim that a public release of this code gives 254 a competitive advantage? Anybody can use it now. Team 11 won the Mid-Atlantic Region Championship with CheesyVision.

[Nick Lawrence]

Originally Posted by TravSatEE

<snip>
I am just surprised that for a high school competition the high-visibility work from your team seems to be mentor-only.
<snip>

Who cares who truthfully does the work? Are the students inspired? Are they motivated to be just like their mentors?

If yes, mission accomplished. It doesn't matter who builds the robot. What matters is what the students get out of it. You don't have to turn a wrench or write software to be inspired to do so.

-Nick

[Jay O'Donnell]

Let's get this thread back on track everyone...

Cheesyvision is really innovative! Way to think outside the box!

[Adam Freeman]

Team 254, thank you!

We ran CheesyVision any time we were doing a 1 ball auto at MSC and it worked perfectly.

You guys are awesome.

[scottandme]

Thanks to 254 for helping to patch the (still broken) field/fms. We're still running a 1 second delay at the start of auton to avoid the timing issues, which was still not enough in at least one of our qualification matches at MAR champs.

[BigJ]

Thanks to 254 for giving us more awesome stuff to look through and use.

Our competition season was over before this release but I think we will be trying to implement this for any offseasons we go to.

[mikemat]

Huge thanks to 254 for releasing this. We showed it to our programmers on Wednesday and had a working hot goal auton before lunch Thursday. You guys saved us a huge amount of time and finally let us get rid of the annoying green led ring our robot. Now if only our shirts weren't tie-dye...