How many days do your programmers get with a fully built robot before stop build day?

[GreyingJay]

How many days?? More like how many minutes

We were just about able to finish the robot before bag and tag, so the software team had very little time with the finished robot before it went into the bag (literally minutes). However, the practice robot was finished a couple of days after that and the software teams had several days, shared with the drive team, to practice and optimize code. And throughout the build season, the teams had many weeks of access to a driving Kit of Parts chassis (but only a stand-in manipulator bolted on).

We made things a bit easier by dividing the software into functional chunks.
- basic driver and manipulator control, using the Java Command Based Robot - team of 3 students
- autonomous commands, sensor fusion and calibration (gyro, encoder PID etc) - team of 3 students
- pan/tilt servo control of on-board camera for vision tracking - one student
- Raspberry Pi running our custom TrackerBox software for target tracking - team of 4-5 students

This division of labour allowed groups to work without everyone needing to use the drive base at the same time. It wasn't perfect, of course, and we will adjust for next year. There was a mad dash at the last minute to do "systems integration" and combine all these products into one, final piece of robot code. This is where we way underestimated the time needed. We were actually still scrambling to integrate our software well into qualifications during our first regional at GTR Central. All our practices, and the start of quals, we were actually still running our hastily written "test" code which had none of the autonomous or vision code. Between matches we would deploy our integrated codebase and continue debugging it.

By Q22 we finally had it functioning, and the students made the (wise) decision to lock it down and use what we had for the rest of the weekend rather than risk additional "live" system testing and tweaking. Between GTR Central and North Bay we spent many hours fine tuning the robot code further, including adding and tweaking all our autonomous routines.