Theft hits Portland FRC Team 1432

[YAK'ker]

http://www.katu.com/news/local/Stole...297233311.html

There's a link on the team's website, if you would like to donate to help them out.

Brings up a question - how do other teams back up their robot's programming?

[asid61]

Github works for us.
I hope they can get things working.

[DarkRune]

Team 4159 uses GitHub. They offer a free private repos to FRC teams, though public repos work just as well. Excellent place to push code to. Let's multiple people work on the code together, with built in version control. It also keeps track of the changes in case something doesn't work you can go and pull the old version.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by YAK'ker

Brings up a question - how do other teams back up their robot's programming?

Commit early, commit often.

This is certainly one of the toughest ways to learn the value of version control that I'm aware of.

[Whippet]

Originally Posted by YAK'ker

Brings up a question - how do other teams back up their robot's programming?

We Dropbox everything we do. I've heard great things about GitHub, but we've never taken the time to set it up.

[orangemoore]

The situation sounds very unfortunate.

Google drive/Dropbox or some other cloud based storage is probably the best way to save code. Currently we use labview and if we were programming with another language we would most likely use github.
This is a reminder for me to upload our code.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Whippet

We Dropbox everything we do. I've heard great things about GitHub, but we've never taken the time to set it up.

Learn it now - you'll soon wonder how you ever got anything done without it. It's a 10x multiplier on your productivity especially if you work with others. Using Dropbox for code is just...not the way to do it.

[YAK'ker]

ironic, I just ran across those insanely cute GitHub stickers in our FRC packet o' stuff today and thought "wow" this looks like something we should be using. Glad to hear others felt it was useful, we will check it out.

[SousVide]

terrible news for #1432, hope they recover well.

Our team use github as well. You can start with your code in a private repos and then change the repos to a public one once you are ready to publish it - before the end of the season.

[Sperkowsky]

We use github also. I'm not trying to offend the news people but to our team coding simple driving (tank mecanum omni ect) is something that take max 20 minutes and to program the lift another maybe 15. If that's not everyone I feel bad and we will help but it shouldn't be an issue for them to come back easily. I'd be more mad they just lost a 500-1000 piece of hardware.

[dtengineering]

A USB key of "known good" software taped to the driver station.

Github, Dropbox, Google Drive... none of them will help if you drop your laptop half-way through re-programming your robot, while you're standing in the queueing line.

With a flash drive and a helpful alliance partner, you at least stand a chance to set things right.

Jason

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by YAK'ker

http://www.katu.com/news/local/Stole...297233311.html

There's a link on the team's website, if you would like to donate to help them out.

Brings up a question - how do other teams back up their robot's programming?

We make a GrabCAD project and upload the files there.

We also back up to a separate USB drive periodically.

[seg9585]

Team 1432, do you need help re-writing your robot code?

If so, let me know, I'd be happy to help. You should be able to borrow spare Driver Station laptops from your local regional.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

We use github also. I'm not trying to offend the news people but to our team coding simple driving (tank mecanum omni ect) is something that take max 20 minutes and to program the lift another maybe 15. If that's not everyone I feel bad and we will help but it shouldn't be an issue for them to come back easily. I'd be more mad they just lost a 500-1000 piece of hardware.

True, but in the stress of competition.. You're right though, assuming a fairly standard drive train and mechanisms, it would not take long to take the sample robot code and turn it into a basic driving robot. You would lose your autonomous code and any mechanism state machines though.

Originally Posted by dtengineering

A USB key of "known good" software taped to the driver station.

Github, Dropbox, Google Drive... none of them will help if you drop your laptop half-way through re-programming your robot, while you're standing in the queueing line.

Yes, my backup strategy would be, GitHub for all development, then a USB stick with the code, and a backup laptop.

GitHub works well but there is a bit of a learning curve, especially when multiple people are working in the same repo at the same time. People fork their own and make their changes and then make pull requests, but they should also pull often to keep theirs up to date. It takes some time to get used to the concept of version control, branches, forks, pushes, pulls, etc.

We were at a point in my team where the kids got in the habit of calling "MERGE!" when they were committing code. Everyone else in the room would yell it back, like a herd of mooing cattle. When we voted to name our robot, "MERGE" got second place!

[MamaSpoldi]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

We use github also. I'm not trying to offend the news people but to our team coding simple driving (tank mecanum omni ect) is something that take max 20 minutes and to program the lift another maybe 15. If that's not everyone I feel bad and we will help but it shouldn't be an issue for them to come back easily. I'd be more mad they just lost a 500-1000 piece of hardware.

It may be true that you could get driving code that quickly, but why would you want to leave yourself with no other option. In addition, for our team the level of sensor integration and other control systems that we have implemented would take days if not weeks to re-create from scratch. This is why we make backups on a flashdrive as well as using an SVN repository on SourceForge.

Originally Posted by dtengineering

A USB key of "known good" software taped to the driver station.

Github, Dropbox, Google Drive... none of them will help if you drop your laptop half-way through re-programming your robot, while you're standing in the queueing line.

With a flash drive and a helpful alliance partner, you at least stand a chance to set things right.
Jason

Exactly! We use our SVN on SourceForge as a development platform for merging code between multiple programmers as well as a backup. But we also keep a backup on flashdrive especially at competition. At an event, whenever a change is made to the code our lead programmer (student) deploys and tests the change... then it is my job as the programming mentor to make a backup of the code which is now on the robot onto my flashdrive. This ensures that we are never in doubt as to what code is currently on the robot. And it gives us immediately available access to our source code since we rarely have internet access at the venue.

So sorry to hear that 1432 learned this the hard way... it is never an easy lesson. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help out in your recovery process.

Good Luck!