This year, we started programming right after kickoff. Our team had a fairly large programming team consisting of the following people: Matt Arroyo, Dale Keith, Sam Lewin, Liz Maurais, Cody Paquette, and Jacob Tilton. While waiting for the CADD model and the prototype, we began lessons in Java and object oriented programming, led by our mentors Mr. Lewin and Mr. Narkis.
Programming lessons
Learning as we go along
Things like classes, arguments, and strings were discussed. Seeing as the members of our programming team all had different computer hardware, configuring the development computers took a long time. Once we had something to work with, we began programming things like the odometer and the drive train. Sharing code among the team was a breeze thanks to our use of Subversion, located on a server inside our Programming Den. Day after day, our programming team was hard at work pondering ideas, fixing bugs, integrating software with hardware, and scribbling down ideas on windows that were used as whiteboards. The programming team was a very tight knit group this year, helping out each other whenever possible, while still providing a challenge to overcome.
Hard at work
Software development is key to the success of the robot’s performance on the field and the we hope the group’s effectiveness will translate to great execution during the competition