reprogram during a competition

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by Mike Betts

Third: Avoid pointer manipulations unless you understand what it does in the machine (some dereferencing manipulations are murder).

Can you explain this one a little more? I'm used to UNIX programming where I never have to worry about this being a problem, so we used pointers quite a bit last year and plan on the same this year.

Originally Posted by Ryan Foley

He brings up a very good point. I believe that in 2003 the Wildstang 111 robot had a Motorola processor on it to do all of the calculations and processing, and the RC itself would be used for only a little bit of the program and the I/O. Go to the Wildstang website and click on "Stang PS" for a bit more information.

You've very close. In 2003 & 2004 the Custom Circuit kept track of our position on the field and every loop of autonomous the RC would ask the CC for the robot's position & heading. Then the RC would determine the path to get to the target, do the driving & arm moving, and recognize when we got to our target. The presentation on our site doesn't show the interface between the RC & CC. For this year we're planning to offload almost all of the positioning & guidance to the CC and have the RC focus on determining what to do based on the strategy, and vision tetra positions.