Silly Programming screw ups (funny)

[Mike Mahar]

In 2007 we couldn't download to the robot using any of our laptops. We had no problem with our desktops, however. We tried everything. Whenever anyone would start to help us they would always ask if we were using the right version of the IFI loader. (version 1.1.0) We'd look at the IFI loader and, sure enough, it would say that it was v1.1.

We didn't figure it out until the start oft he 2008 season. When we looked at the IFI loader is was displaying the version of the RC's firmware on the main panel which happened to to be v1.1. When we looked at the version using the About menu, we found out that the loader was actually version 1.0.9. The desktops had the new version and worked just fine. We did have the 1.1.0 version on the laptops but the quick start button on the task bar was pointing at the 1.0.9 version which was still loaded on the system.

This problem was missed by at least 8 experianced programmers, including two from IFI.

[SgtMillhouse648]

Well, in general, debugging is always the "funnest" part of season...i'm being sarcastic if you didn't catch that one...well, this year, I made a controller for our arm that I strapped to mine, and where I moved my arm, the robot's arm moved...well when we went to test the arm out on last year's robot, I couldn't understand why it was giving me something like -28451 for the degrees of the controller...spent an entire night trying to figure it out. come saturday, I realized what the problem was...I was using int's for my variables and some of my calculations went outside the limits...changed them to longs, and it worked perfect.
Then came the fun part...testing it on this year's robot.
for those of you who don't know, this year's robot's arm can rotate behind it, and with a FP driving it originally, can turn into a giant baseball bat as it's swinging around. Well, I had the m value reversed, so the robot was driving the arm the opposite way it was supposed to. needless to say, I replaced the lower section of the arm at 11:00 the night before our media days...
Malhon