I am a FIRST Alumni and a 2012 Dean’s list finalist. I know the season is approaching fast and I wanted to find a new way to give back to the community. In the next few days I will be developing a site for programmers to request and view tutorials related to anything that could be FIRST related.
I have determined that this could range from anything robot related such as C++, Java, Python, Lua, etc… Other things that may be requested could be website help, Linux scripts (Maybe for vision processing, hint hint). If you can think of another category let me know.
I am looking for some starting requests to help me get the site running quicker.
Veteran Programmers: Please respond with ideas of tutorials/articles that you believe would help newbies. Also if you would like to write one or more for the site PLEASE LET ME KNOW
Newbie Programmers: Please respond with requests that have ether stumped you or you are interested in.
Thanks for allowing me to give back to the community,
Robot vision (smartdashboard extension or LV dashboard)
Networktables
Quad-encoder handling
Are my suggestions to start with.
As for a question…
How would I go about implementing a switch to change between control modes (xbox controller, arcade drive on 1 joystick, cheesy drive, tank drive)?
I was planning to try a sendable chooser in teleopInit() which calls Commands containing the oi code for each control scheme, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or even if it’s going to work.
I personally would love to have something like this that is a little more organized than other websites providing not only just videos but text tutorials that is focused on programming
I want to start a new site because a lot of ones out there already are sloppy, hard to navigate, cant find what you’re looking for and are not tutorials for beginners at all. I have wanted to give back to the community for a while and I thought this would be a good way of doing so.
Humble suggestion: define an initial amount of seed content (tutorials, articles, example downloads, etc) and complete those before you start working on the site. While you’re doing that initial batch, you can be posting them on an existing site.
I only say this because if you’re a programmer, then you likely enjoy programming a more than writing. If you’re concerned about site features like searching and so forth, you’ll get lost for the next couple of months coding up a spectacular site. At the end of those of that you’ll have lost the starting energy on the project that you’re feeling now, and then you’ll be faced with the task of creating all your content. The tendency will be to keep optimizing and adding features to the site rather than halting development to go write the tutorials.
Either that or find yourself a partner to work on this with that’s as enthusiastic as you, so you can “keep each other honest” and ensure that you are working on the things that actually need it.
At least that’s been by personal experience :o
EDIT:
I’ve seen quite a number of “help the rookie” sites of various types pop up, especially this fall, requesting for people to create content. Unfortunately, if someone’s willing to create content, they probably already have and posted it somewhere. The chance that they’ll be inspired just because there’s a new site is probably pretty slim. I would expect a high amount of requests and expectations and a relatively lower amount of help.
All of the prior discussion mentions some really good points that you should consider. There are a lot of great resources out there such as the WPI think Tank, NI website, CD whitepapers etc.
Maybe you could take all of this (relatively unorganized) information, and formulate a “lesson plan” sort of tutorial set. Ranging from absolute “I have never programmed before” to the very advanced.
Do not copy others work, but simply create a coherent list for someone to follow, with links to the existing resources. Through organizing all of this, you will be able to find holes in what is out there, as compared to what people are interested in. With this you can challenge yourself and other members of the FRC community to give back by helping fill in those holes.
But most importantly, do not lose track of your dreams and goals of the project – Forge On!
