After years of repeated communication issues at FIRST regionals, team 449’s programmers have decided that it is our duty to entertain our drivers while they wait for robot communications. Accordingly, during the last few weeks of build season, we programmed the classic video game “Snake” in LabVIEW and made it a part of our dashboard. We started with code from https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-15149 and modified it to make a two-player competitive version of snake. As a safety measure we automatically hid the snake game while the robot was enabled and provided the drivers with a button to hide the game so they could view the diagnostics it covers without enabling the robot.
All of our robot’s code is open source and can be found at https://svn.robot.mbhs.edu/svn/firstRoboticsCode2012 (you will get some warning about our certificate being expired; that’s ok, we just haven’t gotten around to setting up SSL properly). While you can view the directory structure and download files from your web browser, this is actually an SVN repository and you should probably check it out with an SVN client such as TortoiseSVN. Feel free to copy Snake or any other part of our code; just give credit where it is due.
We are planning to make another game next year, only this time starting development during preseason training. I encourage other teams to follow our lead and look forward to seeing the results.