A mentor just pointed me to page 9 in “Section 5 - The Robot.”
<R17> During the “FIX-IT WINDOWS” following the shipment of the robot: During this period, all teams may utilize one or two 5-hour FIX-IT-WINDOWS to manufacture SPARE and REPLACEMENT PARTS and develop software for their robot at their home facility …
<R18> Prior to the competitions: After the close of the “FIX-IT WINDOWS” and prior to the competition, the team must put down their tools, cease fabrication of robot parts, and cease all software development … But no construction or fabrication of any hardware, or development of any software, is allowed.
Gee… I wonder how they’ll enforce that rule. Are they like going to employ the NSA to track all conversations between participants in hotel rooms? OR are they going to hack our computers, or register them into a database in which they could lock them after Fix-it windows. Hmmm… very interesting thing to bring up. We’ll see what happens.
Well hopefully they never need to enforce this rule. However, it would be rather interesting if MPLab and the controllers had been designed to help enforce this rule, it would be amusing to see threads titled “Help! Robot refuses to let me break the rules”.
It’s an honor system I think…i don’t think mplab would shut down…since it’s dled off the microchip website and FIRST isnt the only organization to use it for development.
Besides, my mentor said he’d report me if I spent longer than 10 hours coding after ship date.
well, for teams that compete that first weekend, it might not seem like the rule matters much, but if you’re regional isn’t for a month after ship date, you could do some serious coding… Just because a rule is impractical to enforce, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be followed. It’s all about the honor system.
if you have an idea in your head, and you write down some thoughts
or draw a flow chart, or a Yourden diagram and data dictionary, are you developing SW?!
does this apply to HW and mechanical engineers too? are they forbidden to think about the robot until their first competition? forbidden to scribble on a napkin, to talk to each other about ways to make the robot better when they get to their 1st regional?
The rule is just like the hardware rules; you may think of things that you could do in the first day at regionals, but you can’t actually test it or build it.
I believe they had a similar rule like this last year. Maybe we missed it or something?
cant test it ? proto bot ;)… . but yes it is all up to gracious professionalism… and they could have coded it so that if your using MPLab and working on code that has certain things that are common to every robotics code… then shutdown at certain date…
thats the thing. Are you allowed to draw mechanical things on a piece of paper before your first day at regionals? to figure out measurements? to make scale drawings? To make a prototype at home to see if it works, then fabricate it over again at the regional?
the problem with SW is that once you write it down (type the code out) you are mostly done.
I dont know about anyone else, but if I have a problem to solve it simmers on the back burner of my brain all the time, and when an answer bubbles to the surface I have to stop what Im doing and write it down. For SW that means writing down an alogrithm, or a bubble diagram, or a flow chart.
The rules forbid this?! you would have to heavily sedate me! :ahh:
I believe you can come up with all the “ideas” that you want. However I don’t believe you can actually test them on a robot, and testing is the most time consuming part usually.
I know last year, we wrote notes down on things to come up with for the Regional, however we did not test anything or load it onto any previous robots. At Regionals, we retyped all the code on site, then loaded it there and tested it. I think half of it ended up not working anyway, but we still managed to get some accomplished.
This question came up last year and was addressed in the official FIRST Q&A:
See:
Basically, most teams interpret this to mean you have to type in new source code into the version that was used at the time of ship or the prior competition.
