As we will enter our first competition in a few weeks, we wanted to give a dedicated thank you to some community members who helped us throughout the building and programming process this season. Although we didn’t have a programming mentor or an electrician on hand during the build season, in times when we were very lost and sometimes hopeless, the people in this community were ready to help us.
As this is most of our first years in robotics, we often needed a lot of help with basic things. All throughout the development, troubleshooting, and debugging process of the code, the people were ready to help us figure out what was wrong and point out ways to improve. We want to mention a couple of names who really helped us:
@GeeTwo @brandon5638 @NewtonCrosby @JohnGilb @Peter_Johnson @Mark_McLeod @bsimmons you have helped us so much! In times of desperate needs for help and time constraints, without your help, our robot likely couldn’t have even driven functionally. We can’t believe how helpful and responsive you were, especially with helping the robot’s drive code working properly.
… And all the others who helped respond to our threads, as well as to the community members who posted other topics and responded to them!
All of you guys have been invaluable mentors to us this season, and we cannot thank you enough for the support.
Hope everyone has a good time at this year’s and future competitions!
Glad to be of help! You should know that help at competitions is also easy to come by. Everybody in FIRST (or at least everybody who gets FIRST) wants every team to be able to compete to the best of their ability. The Control System Advisors (orange ballcaps, a hair yellower than safety orange) are the best place to go if you are having what appear to be programming, network, or other control system issues. Your robot inspector (look for the highlighter yellow ballcaps) may be able to help for electrical or mechanical, or suggest a local team who can help. A quick trip around the pits looking for veteran teams who aren’t currently pulling their hair out and a willingness to ask is also likely to hook you up with someone who can help. There is a spare parts table where you can get some fairly common and FRC loaner parts.
If all else fails, go to the pit admin desk and get them to announce something like “Team 9876 needs help with ___”. Try to be specific - if programming, say what language. If using a specific device, name the device. Also, feel free to ask for a specific part or tool! Teams sometimes literally trip over each other trying to be the first to help.
I think by and large what all the mentors want out of FIRST is to have the kids experience some wildly hard technical challenges, and have a positive experience.
Whether that positive experience is winning an event, or just getting to the point where you can get the robot on the field driving is irrelevant. Everyone’s level of a “winning” season is different. Happy to help get you guys off the ground as you’re getting started. Everyone here helping was also brand new at some point, asking roughly the same questions you’ve had.
I can’t emphasize this enough. At Granite State this year mentors from 6 different teams were clustered in a rookie team’s pit helping troubleshoot a code issue (which turned out to be a firmware version problem if I recall correctly). Of course we want our teams to win, but we’re really here to support all students in this endeavor.
Also, feel free to ask for a specific part or tool! Teams sometimes literally trip over each other trying to be the first to help.
My favorite incident was when we blew a motor during finals of a Week 0 event and the opposing alliance ran over with a replacement. THAT is FRC to me.
Assuming you can call us veterans - Even if I am pulling my hair out, I often would welcome the reprieve of working on someone else’s problem, rather than my own :).
