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A new step in collaboration: FIRST Programmers' Guild
This is an idea I've had floating around in my head for months, and was encouraged to formalize and post about by a few friends.
As many of you know, students and mentors have created various suborginizations within FIRST to aid in communication, increase knowledge shared between teams, and just make the whole FIRST experience better for everyone. Some of these groups include the "Western Region Robotics Forum" and "East Coast Driver's Union" I would like to suggest a new group to everyone, one that can not only raise general knowledge of its subject among its members, but also help the entire FIRST community. This group would be known as the "FIRST Programmer's Guild" (if anyone can think of a better name, please feel free to submit it ) As many of you know, every year teams are given the basic tools to create a program that will run a robot under autonomous and driver control. At the beginning of the build, expectations for provided subsystems are high, but often flop due to lack of programming support and time on teams. (example: the vision system )FIRST provides teams with a robot's "basic needs" code wise. We are also able to access driver programs for different sensors and applications. Most people have a great grasp on how all of these things work, and the understanding of how to utilize them to accomplish their ideas, but get stuck on the actual implementation and debugging of said subsystems. For example, my team had plans for a "navigation" system which could keep track of absolute robot position, and had all the code written and working on the EDU-RC. But, the project ultimately fell through when trying to debug this system on the FRC controller in too short of a time span. Now imagine, if my team's programmers was working with other teams student and programmers and mentors on a "default" navigation driver which was tested and proven, we could spend more time on actually implementing this system for a successful autonomous program, rather than spending the time we did on debugging. In addition to working together on publicly available systems, the FPG would work to increase the skill and competitiveness of rookie teams. We would invite rookie programmers into the group, with hopes of their education and creation of a successful and powerful robot user code. With suppliers such as Andy Mark, and the FPG providing new and exciting "default" codes, you may see many rookie teams in the future making more complex machines, such as omni directional drive bases. If we can provide teams with a stronger base to work with, they will be able to springboard off of that to new and exciting things some people never thought possible. I would like to get some engineers on this website interested in this project, and hopefully work with students to get it up and running. Programmers are given the great resource of Chief Delphi to ask experienced engineers questions, but why ask questions when you can work hand in hand with these engineers with the same goals in mind. I think if the task of FIRST programming is given an easier learning curve, and there are engineers and experienced students there to work with rookies, more students will be inspired to pursue a career in computer sciences and will decrease the current overpowering ratio of mechanical: programming student interests. There’s power in numbers, and this group could possibly change the way programming is looked at in FIRST, and hopefully increase the respect for programmers. There’s power in numbers, and this organization could definitely help the future of FIRST. Comments/Questions? Last edited by Tom Bottiglieri : 28-03-2005 at 21:38. |
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