why blame the programmers??

[RandomStyuff]

I guess I'm lucky then. In my team there is full understanding by all teams of the other teams. The mechanical is easy to understand, and the programmers understand the mechanical. A quick course on the electrical was given by me to all team members just before the start of the season (electrical is in programming team's turf here, although it's pretty much a cooperative thing).

The thing that makes my team slightly special is the understanding of programming: my school is called Aleh High School of Sciences, and as you can guess from the name, it's a pretty geeky school, where around half the students study computer science. As weird as it may seem, this year all of the 12th graders in my team except for one (our connectivity manager) major in Advanced Computer Science which includes in it a couple of university level courses. Next year, the two leaders of the Mechanical team are also Advanced Computer Science students, and the management will again be made up of almost exclusively Advanced CS students, with the only blacksheep being a girl who is doing the normal Computer Science course (cause she couldn't fit the advanced one into her schedule without taking out Chemistry or Physics)

The end result is a team which not only understands what code is, but can actually read it. This year when both my number two and I were gone for a few days during the season, a 12th grader from the Mechanical team came and took over temporarily in making sure the code is done. Our Mechanical manager even sat with me and helped me debug some code during a free hour once.

That doesn't always help though: we have a running joke that I'm probably to blame for (seeing as at the start of the season I was sure our programming team could do anything we wanted (which isn't too far from truth, we got the Innovation in Control award for some pretty awesome algorithms we implemented with our camera and and other impressive things like rewriting half of the WPI-libs stuff, including the low-level, and writing our own accumulator, to be able to get 3 gyros working on the robot.)). Every problem that comes up our Mechanical team's manager shouts "They'll fix it in software."
The climax came three hours before the shipping, when we discovered our scale was mis-calibrated, and that we were 7 kg overweight. Our mechanical team manager again shouted that we'll fix it in software (technically, if you write all the unused 0s into 1s there needs to be a positive charge, therefore the electrons leave for the battery, saving you the weight of an electron for each one.... sadly, the maximum you'd be able to save is about as equal to 1/10,000th of an atom... some bored kid did the math).