I’ve been wondering if there are any ways to develop the robot code from my phone. Do you know of any apps for android or websites I could use to develop our code on the go? At the moment were using netbeans with the project in a dropbox folder.
Two things:
First, developing robot code (assuming your using wpilibj) on a phone would be super tricky, seeing as the projects depend on the plugins being installed on Netbeans.
Secondly, I would highly recommend NOT using dropbox to share code. It is very easily prone to mess a lot of things up. I would say to use git or svn, depending on your needs. Github is a great place to host code repos (or google code, that’s good too).
I also discourage dropbox for code.
While I wouldn’t recommend trying to do much coding on mobile devices, Github does have an app for Android that allows you to view, edit, and commit code to your repository on mobile devices. I don’t know if a similar app exists for iOS.
We tried the idea last year before season, worst idea we ever did. Code can’t be merged, it’s a pain to make all account sync right, etc. The only advantage is it’s cloud storage for having a backup. However, github fixes all of these issues.
As for mobile development, I suggest a netbook. There, $200-ish (Which is the contract price of my phone). And work fine for rapid coding you need to get done / are portable enough. Coding on your phone would probably be harder then a netbook.
Thanks for the info on mobile development, but I’ve never had a problem with dropbox. I’ve used it for a while now personally and its never had an issue.
More details on dropbox as version control. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8238399/dropbox-as-a-programmers-source-control