Programming: On and Off Season

[Triapod]

We have a small team and despite dividing into different groups, each person gets a taste of each task. During the first few weeks of the season, before the robot design is decided, what should programmers do? For us, the experienced programmers usually use this time to teach the new ones.

Also, off season what should programmers do? I would like to improve to improve my skills as to accommodate any ingenious plans my team comes up with. I have watched the FRCMastery videos and usually play around with the example vi's. What resources do you suggest?

[kamocat]

I think the Lego Mindstorms kit is actually an excellent resource for experimentation and learning LabVIEW. If you're interested in making your own sensors, all the input ports are both I2C and analog.

The FTC kits are also lots of fun, especially due to the motors and motor controllers.

[dirienzo]

Coming from a non-LabView team:

Prior to build season, we teach the new programmers enough to write tank drive code. Along with that, we teach the fundamentals of any language, like looping, if cases, structure, etc.

This past build season, we used the "Blue Pelican Java" book to teach unexperienced students the fundamentals of Java. The students work on the projects in the book while the more experienced programmers write code for the robot and help the others on projects if they get stuck.

I'm going to take this off-season to learn more about camera logic, different types of drive-trains, etc. The more you practice, the better you get. So just keep on coding.

I hope I helped though.

[Triapod]

Thanks for the information. I am thinking about purchasing a labview book but most do not talk about the FRC toolkit and given Vi's right. Is there anywhere I can get this information?

[kamocat]

There's some links under "software documentation" on the FRC 2009 Control System page.
Are there any specific questions you have?
Have you looked at the help for the VIs? (I know that some of it is poorly documented and hard to understand if you don't already understand all the hardware.)

[Triapod]

I'm a relatively new programmer and this was our second year and the two in programming, me and another, have been mostly self-taught. We recieved some help on basics.

In the first year, with lunacy we programmed only a drive system and a motor-operated kicker.
This year, we investigated using the compressor, solenoids and using state machines. I have taken a look, but have not completly understood things like PID control used with servos to avoid jerky movement.

--From here, what is the next stage?
We really haven't touched any sensors other than the limit switch so im thinking that is the next step.


I have tried to get actual team codes (some teams posed their lunacy codes) which seem like better resources than just the example codes given.

[dotbran]

If you can get ahold of it, the best way to practice is to polish, restructure, and improve your team's old robot code. I personally like to just tack on advanced functions that would have been impractical to build just to see what I can do.