Meeting at Nationals

[Curtis Williams]

I saw the signs up at nats last year and intended on going, but you know how it is. Drivers always blame their mistakes on the program. Hopefully next year we can get a more powerful controller and can replace drivers with small scripts.

[Beowulf]

Look for me in a white lab coat with #114 on the back.

[Malakili]

Count me in for the programmers confrence

[Ian W.]

Originally posted by Curtis Williams
I saw the signs up at nats last year and intended on going, but you know how it is. Drivers always blame their mistakes on the program. Hopefully next year we can get a more powerful controller and can replace drivers with small scripts.

i thnik if you really wanted to, you could program the robot to move automatically for 2 minutes. of course, it would take lots of time to get it to work right, but it would be pretty cool. maybe a side project for me. or, if we can make a laptop control program (just for the hell of it), program that to make the robot do certain things. drivers are overrated, unless the you're the driver (which i sometimes am). the best part is just to play with the inputs, so you have to be the driver, cause no one else knows the buttons or joysticks.

[Greg McCoy]

FIRST Lego League is like this - I hated programming it. Everything has to be automatic. You press a button - it does it.

You have to use either timings or use a rotation sensor to figure out how far you wanted to go. If you used timings, as the battery wore out the timings changed, throwing everything off. Rotation sensors get confused when you turn. You can use light sensors to follow lines on the field, but it takes too long.

Also, the "RIS" software you had to use was terrible. It was too "user-friendly" for me.

I'm really glad I can work on real robots now

[Ian W.]

heh, i guess while programming the robot to be automatic would be cool, we don't really have what it takes to make a robot do that. maybe, if someone can find a way to control te robot through a laptop (for non-season use only, duh ), you could make a program on the computer that ran through timings. that would be interesting.

[Gui Cavalcanti]

This conference is actually gonna happen this year! WOO! Sorry... pent up joy due to the failure of last year's conference...

Now, as for when:

Right now the schedule seems to be Thursday from 12 to 1 and Friday during lunch (don't know when it's scheduled...). The reasons for two conferences are that there are a lot of people with a lot of cool ideas which you just can't get to all at once, a lot of people could forget/get drawn away by robot problems, and sometimes you just gotta be with your team.

Team 422 will be handing out fliers both Thursday and Friday to remind everyone. On Thursday we will have a complimentary "runner" service. You tell us when your next practice match number is, we'll keep everyone informed of what matches are going on in what stadium. That way, nobody misses a match they have to attend.

Also, 422 will steal a bit of time at the beginning of the two conferences to announce our desperate need for web space, a domain name, and general help to keep the CODEX somewhat alive. It's been in a coma for the past couple of months, so...

One last thing. If everything works out well, we'll be giving out logic chips from an old Apple IIE's motherboard to every programmer that shows up (first come first serve) as a general programmer-only handout. We just have to figure out how to mount them somewhere so that they don't impale the wearer...

If anyone wants to figure out an actual agenda so we can do presentations maybe (like StangSense, acceleration programming, crab drive... anything), just respond here and we'll set things up.

One... teeny... last thing 422 will also hand out what we call the "PBasic Field Manual". Essentially it's a medium-sized packet going over everything in the big red PBasic Bible applicable to the robotics competition, squished into a readable size without confusing non-robotic examples. Respond if you're interested, because we may not have enough copies for everyone.

[Ian W.]

I WANT!!! the regular manual just had so much stuff, and being a "newbie" i sorta got lost for hours at a time lookig somethnig up. having something condensed would be great. as to the apple chips, that's pretty cool too, now i have to make sure i go.

[Curtis Williams]

I've been thinking about writing an annotated copy of the default program with explanations for rookie teams. So many teams using default programs....it makes me cry. Last year (my rookie year) I spent 2 days just staring, absorbing the code. A weekend of isolation, surviving only on Dr. Pepper and pizza. This should not be requeired of rookie teams.


See you at the meeting.

Also, I think you can add a cheap microcontroller on your custom circuit board, so replacing the driver is not far away.

[The Lucas]

I would like to attend the convention if I can get out of the pit (extreme difficult considering the amount of battle damage our robot sustains and all the modifications we make).

Originally posted by Ian W.
you could program the robot to move automatically for 2 minutes.

We built an code sequence to automatically steer our robot to the goals. Since we used to get to the goals in about 1.5 sec (bosch high direct mount) the drivers had little time to react. We were going to log the joystick values through the dashboard and automatically give these values to the drive calc code when the driver pushed a button. Unfortunately, we didn't use it because we changed the drive train.
Also, we were going to program a joke into the robot to lighten up the debug phase. Whenever the driver moved the stick out of the deadzone the robot would drive in a "figure 8". However, we were too busy during crunch time to debug a fake problem. See you at the convention (hopefully)!

[Ian W.]

Originally posted by Curtis Williams
I've been thinking about writing an annotated copy of the default program with explanations for rookie teams. So many teams using default programs....it makes me cry. Last year (my rookie year) I spent 2 days just staring, absorbing the code. A weekend of isolation, surviving only on Dr. Pepper and pizza. This should not be requeired of rookie teams.

do that many teams use the default code!?! i'm on a rookie team, and we didn't. when the 6 weeks started, the two juniors who were supposed to code dropped the team, so me and another person (SuperDanMan), who were just supposed to learn the code this year and program next year, sat in front of a computer for about an hour or two, and learned just about every line of the default code. that very day, we then procceeded to modify it, and by the end of the build period, had completely altered everything that we knew how to. the only thing we couldn't figure out, that we needed this year, was the uP initilization. we left that as it was.

i just don't see why rookie teams don't make thier own code. even though i've only been taking C++ since this year, and Dan's been taking VB since last year, C++ since this year, we managed to make our own code. sure, we scrapped the default, but that's what it's there for. it's called PBASIC for a reason, if you take the time to learn it, it's basic! it's actually a lot easier than C++, if you only have a little knowledge in either, but i like C++ better, cause you can do many more things. all rookie teams attending nats should send their best math/logic person/people to the conference. i know i'll be there.

[Beowulf]

The WRRF has made this neat template for coding. It makes it a lot easier than trying to figure out the Default code. Lemme go look for it...


Ah, ha. Found it. Formatting's screwed up for some odd reason.

[Ian W.]

hmm, the template is interesting, although i think i actually find it slightly harder to understand then the default program. maybe cause i just looked over it fast, or maybe cause the default didn't use gosubs and everything went in the order that the uP used it (declarations, initilizations, mainloop, etc.). maybe i'll try using that next year, cause next year i'm gona have to teach PBASIC to my team. maybe have them look over that, and using that, make this year's robot work, or something like that. maybe have them make code that's more effecient than this year's.

[K. Skontrianos]

Some members of team 102 have been working on a GPS guided robot that can drive itself to any point we tell it to. We have the robot pretty much built and are now working on the program. While it doesn't seem likely that we can bring the GPSbot to Nationals , we'll bring some of the code along. Maybe some programmers will have some good suggestions for us. If you want to see what have done so far, check out the link below. Oh yeah, i have to mention Lucent. They gave us a $1,000 grant to do this project, so we greatly appreciate their generosity.

[srawls]

Count me in! As the programmer for team 122, (plus with all those nifty handouts ) I wouldn't miss this for the world. I wanted to go last year, but I had to stay in the pits and debug our code, but this year I should be free at least durring lunch.

See ya there!
Stephen