**FIRST EMAIL**/Invitation to Beta test the New Control System

[Kims Robot]

1511 Submitted with 191, 378, 1126, 1405, 1507, 1551, 2228 & 2340 (anyone recognize the Ruckus committee & our labview teams?? - lol). We are acting as the leaders, so we just submitted our award info and the essay is based mostly off our team experience since it just seemed easier for the form and to keep the characters short.

Good luck to all the teams that get a system... its going to be a crazy preseason!

[Leav]

Hi Kim (and anyone else who submitted for more than 3 teams)

just wondering: what your rational was in submitting for so many teams?
do you plan on moving the controller between those teams evenly?
or perhaps all those teams are the one's who are in your area and will benefit from your team having a controller and giving classes on it?

My team contemplated a joint submission with another team, but the situation In Israel is slightly different:
http://www.iris.org.il/images/usa.gif
(I don't know what iris.org.il is all about and I don't necessarily approve of the content. I just googled "Israel size comparison")

we hope to have 50 teams next year, but all those teams are at the very most a 5 hour drive away (from where my team is located). so we just stated that we plan to have "Controller weekend(s)" for all teams at our place.

I'm just hoping First will send us (any team in Israel) a controller...

Good Luck!
-Leav

Edit:

Originally Posted by 0705920

Teams 39 and 842 have submitted a joint application as well. Looking forward to it.

(or did I miss his/her/their identity being revealed?)

[Andrew Schuetze]

Upon reading here that several teams submitted joint applications, I became curious as to how many applications have more than one team listed. I started a poll in another forum since I couldn't add a poll to this thread. Please post your number in the poll and then comment on how that came to be. Please vote even if you are a single team application such as is the Toltech application.

Poll

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Leav

Hi Kim (and anyone else who submitted for more than 3 teams)
just wondering: what your rational was in submitting for so many teams?
do you plan on moving the controller between those teams evenly?
or perhaps all those teams are the one's who are in your area and will benefit from your team having a controller and giving classes on it?

In Rochester, a lot of the teams work together on several different things, everything from Ruckus planning to local demos to helping the Rookie/younger teams. While our team probably has the strongest labview base, there are other teams that were very interested but just didnt feel they could handle running the whole Beta test themselves. We took the lead and asked them to join us because we feel they will have expertise and time that could help us as well, and want more than just our team to have hands on with this system.

We will likely be the center team, hosting the controller, but we had plans of having saturdays where other teams could bring their robot in, demos at Ruckus, webcast trainings and phone conferences to involve teams further out, and a lot of documentation on our wiki & forums. We will be inviting all of the teams that want to drive out here to be involved in any/all of the process, but these were just the teams that we have been interacting with for Ruckus planning and the teams that have been attending our Labview training all summer.

I think for us, it just made sense, we can run the Beta testing, but bring in expertise from all the other teams in the area to help out and assist in problems as welll as taking time to teach as many teams as we can.

[The Lucas]

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

We will likely be the center team, hosting the controller, but we had plans of having saturdays where other teams could bring their robot in, demos at Ruckus, webcast trainings and phone conferences to involve teams further out, and a lot of documentation on our wiki & forums. We will be inviting all of the teams that want to drive out here to be involved in any/all of the process, but these were just the teams that we have been interacting with for Ruckus planning and the teams that have been attending our Labview training all summer.

I think for us, it just made sense, we can run the Beta testing, but bring in expertise from all the other teams in the area to help out and assist in problems as welll as taking time to teach as many teams as we can.

With that many teams it would be interesting if some of the teams programmed in Labview and others programmed in C++. It would be very difficult for a single team to program the robot in both languages (the dashboard is a different story). Especially when one is a visual language so find & replace can't help. Also, it would also be far too confusing for the students who need to focus on a language to learn for that year. However, with more teams, each team can focus on their language of choice and share the robot. You can even have different programmers reprogram the robot between Labview and C++ without switching cables

Labview is obviously Rolling Thunder's forte. I've gotten to know SparX programmers enough to know they are C gurus, even diving into the adc library to modify it. They sound like perfect candidates to help develop the open source C++ libraries as a C++ lead team. Your collaboration has the potential to do more "Beta Testing" than any of the other recipients by developing thoroughly in both languages and comparing first hand.

Obviously, the choice between Labview and C++ is the most important decision programming teams face this year. I am not trying to make that decision for anyone, or give anyone more work/confusion. Just a idea I would like all the Beta Testing collaborations to consider.

Good Luck to all teams as we break new ground,
Brian

<SIDE RANT> I don't see the major advantage to installing the cRIO controls system on multiple bots. Without multiple power distro blocks, digital sidecars, etc... it is an intense electrical task to move the cRIO between robots. Even if you build a modular panel, it still is time consuming to switch. IMHO, no matter how many teams you have:
-Use 1 testbed bot
-Load it with sensors and mechanisms
-Maximize precious uptime for your programmers
</SIDE RANT>

[hallk]

Several of the Milwaukee teams plan to work together (if one of us gets it) but submitted seperately to try to increase our odds.

[Akash Rastogi]

Speaking of programming in various languages and diversifying the results, is anyone planning on having students programming in Python? Just curious.

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by The Lucas

Labview is obviously Rolling Thunder's forte. I've gotten to know SparX programmers enough to know they are C gurus, even diving into the adc library to modify it.

Actually our Labview Guru is a Lead Test Engineer here at Harris, and is typically our our Drivetrain Mentor and leads the Strategy Subteam. Our two lead programmers work entirely in C and had their six students writing in C last year. All the work that they have done through the past four years has all been in C, including our Camera work and all of our PIDs. They also helped half our alliance partners program auto modes in Philly, and did some similar work in Atlanta last year. So we have a fair amount of background in C ourselves, but havent yet had the experience of trying to use Labview to program the robot. I expect we would start the port with C code, and then try and figure out how to redo a bunch of it in Labview so we could instruct teams that want to go that route. But yes we are looking forward to working with SparX, XCats and the other teams for their wealth of knowledge as well!

[Nate Smith]

Update through the FRC Blog this morning...

Originally Posted by Bill's Blog

Did you apply to be a Beta Test Team for the 2009 FRC Control System? 159 teams did. Their applications were sorted by state, the duplicate entries were removed and everything is now in the hands of the panel of Woodie Flowers Award Winners who will be making the final selections over the next week. Teams should hear by September 2nd if they’ve been chosen and we expect to start shipping supplies to Beta Test teams by September 15th. We are encouraging Beta Test Teams to share their experience with the entire FIRST community so watch for more details after that date. Good luck. I’m looking forward to your feedback.

134 days until Kickoff! See you then.

[ATannahill]

we were suppose to hear by september 1st

[Madison]

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

we were suppose to hear by september 1st

September 1 is Labor Day.

[ATannahill]

do volunteers benefit from Labor Day?

[Cory]

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

do volunteers benefit from Labor Day?

FIRST has employees which are paid, and as such, will not be at work on a holiday to be sending out email blasts.

What difference does a day make?

[IndySam]

I do believe there is a little kidding involved.

[Joe Ross]

I think all the evaluators deserve a tremendous thank you. I can't imagine trying to evaluate 159 essays in 15 days or less. That's 10 a day, as a volunteer. I have a feeling that at least some of them will be giving up part of their holiday to work on this.

I'm very glad I'm not in their position.