Anyone here ever been on an FRC team? I'd love to hear some

>>9135247
Underageb&

Alum of FRC team 4910.

I wish robotics wasn't so hard to explain.
>yeah so in an alliance of 4, we were 2nd pick by the captain and our alliance placed 3rd in half of the world

Years 2013-2017, was head programmer.

>>9135247
I was on FRC Team 555 and FTC Team 147.
It was a lot of fun. I started the CAD division on our team.
Last year, we finally did the least bit well for the first time, but due to low funding couldn't go to Worlds. We were alliance captains in all of our competitons, and we haven't been captain for 8 years. Pretty exciting.

File: michigun.jpg (70KB, 500x521px) Image search: [Google]

70KB, 500x521px

>>9135247

I rarely saw the point of it. Our team was dominated by a small cadre of CAD autists and people trying to hack together a decent frame. A bunch of people (including me) joined around our Junior years. What a fucking waste. Nobody knew what they were doing, I was horribly inept with basic tools, apathy was at an all time high.

Somehow through the use of older code and decent CAD work our high school team actually did better than usual by the second year. I gained no fucking experience with technology, rather me and the other clueless retards were assigned to run the concessions stand or do bitch work.

I hope they all become opiate addicts and OD their senior year of college.

And fuck Southeast Michigan for that matter.

I lead a team and it was a good experience, I'm still involved with robotics competitions and research in uni.

>>9136735
Mike Thompson is a closeted faggot.

>>9136769
who is mike thompson and why is he relevant?

>>9135247
I had tons of fun junior and senior year messing around with FRC. I started our school's team with some of my buddies and my chem teacher. We had no idea what we were doing but managed to zip-tie together a robot together minutes before our first match. We were so unsophisticated compared to other teams it was almost hilarious. The only time we ever used CAD was to design a frame the 2nd year for a local business to machine it but it was ultimately useless because apparently you dont need a steel frame held together with 8in bolts with chain driven 12 in pneumatic wheels to drive over some wooden blocks.

Most of the time was spent just messing around and having fun before throwing together something that worked better than it should.

File: mmmmm.gif (1MB, 250x231px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 250x231px

>>9135247
I was part of FTC for Sophomore through to Senior years of high school.

Sophomore year I joined the one team that we had at the school, along with a good few other people, and was mentored by the upperclassmen.

Junior and Senior year the aforementioned team was split, with half remaining and the other half, including me, forming a new team.

My Junior and Senior year were during the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 seasons respectively, for some perspective in regards to the competitions.

Both of these years I was the head programmer on the team, responsible for the Teleop and Autonomous programs.

The 2015-2016 season was pretty chill, we had a robot with a pretty interested mechanism, but turned out to fail completely because of worm gears during the first competition.

For the second competition, we completely redesigned our robot, turing it into what vet's from that team would call "Dinkle-Bot". I was a bit salty because I had this entire script planned out for the original robot to execute for autonomous, but in the end Dinkle-Bot was small, simple, and fast.

During that second competition we were at the top of leader-boards for qualifiers, same thing in the third competition, but both times during elimination we would get well into the rounds, but then get knocked out due to poor team mates or hardware / software malfunction.

During the third competition, we were knocked out in an extremely controversial manner. One elimination round both alliances were extremely close, and the winner came down to the decision of the judges. However, the issue was that the judges allowed the rounds to continue, so we continued.

In a later round, we were one round away from winning and being qualified for states, and the judges just then made the final call that we had lost that previous round, and we got disqualified.

The 2016-2017 competition was a bit more interesting in terms of my work as the head programmer.

During the competition, I primarily focused on the autonomous programming, and me and another Senior, let's call him Davis, were both in the team together.

Davis and I both worked on what would be fundamentally the most important and interesting mechanism of the robot, and that would be the drive base.

The drive base consisted of four wheels in a square orientation.

Each of these four wheels consisted of the wheel mounted onto a dc motor, which itself was mounted on a axel that, through the use of a metal ring encased in 3d printed material, would allow for 360 degree motion with constant power transmission to the dc motor. This rotary motion would be executed by a central motor whose radial motion was transmitted to the other four drive wheels through the use of a chain.

Davis was responsible for putting together and theorizing the mechanism, and I was responsible for programming it and giving feedback to make sure that the mechanism was as optimized for my autonomous routine as possible.

The absolute advantage of this mechanism was that the drive base's orientation was independent of that of the robot.

You see, the competition this year, you can look up it for more details, in terms of autonomous, was just a flat field with buttons to press.

I thought that for autonomous, the most efficient way to implement it was through the use of a script defined by a functional command architecture, which is what I did.

Where the drive base mechanism came in is that with the way it was designed, I could very explicitly and precisely control where the robot would go, and, because of the aforementioned advantage, I could know exactly where the robot was facing at what point of the routine.

The main advantage of this was the following :

Throughout the season the robot is in a constant period of construction, testing, revision, deconstruction and reconstruction, until a couple weeks before the competition in which I would have time to test the autonomous with a final robot.

If the robot's hardware was being worked on, I could not use it for autonomous, and that was the case for most of the season.

So, my solution to this issue was this : develop the robot's system in such a way that autonomous can be tested through calculation without the need of practical, physical trial.

Because of the aforementioned benefits, this allowed for much of the work of autonomous to be done without the robot being available for practical testing, and when it was available for practical testing, I was already in the ballpark of accuracy, so I only had small revisions to do, which greatly reduced practical testing time.

Overall, from that season, the main things that I shall remember fondly from autonomous are the functional command architecture, the effective and efficient coordination between the autonomous programming and drive base engineering, and the "Tokyo Drift" maneuver that I developed with that drive base during autonomous testing.

I'm out of FTC right now, I met a couple of people in university engineering that were also FTC Vets, and we talk about various competitions, our opinions about the organization, and also what we did in our respective teams.

I started to get fed up with the 2016-2017 competition because it was not fun to program autonomous for. Sure, I made my own fun out of the whole affair, but the main kick I get out of programming a.i. is taking into account environmental dynamics, and factoring in random possibilities and developing contingencies for them.

I feel that said "environmental dynamism" is a lot more of a thing in FRC, and it certainly was a thing in the 2015-2016 FTC competition, but there certainly wasn't any in the 2016-2017 competition, which made the whole thing rather dreadful for me towards the end.

When it comes to FIRST and the FTC, I have some things I'd like to say.

Firstly, the whole notion of using Android as a robotics computing platform and the Java programming language for programming is crazy to me.

It's so fucking wasteful in terms of computing power for what I perceive as a fairly mild task.

Dealing with Android bullshit was tolerable for a time, but I always agonized about having to use fucking Java for something that I could've done in assembly just fine.

Secondly, the FTC shills for autonomous sensors so fucking hard, and give out the award for autonomous basically upon how you use sensors.

For the 2016-2017 competition, as I said, there was barely any dynamism in the environment, so I didn't have a reason to use sensors.

I could've used sensors, and by the FTC's sentiments I should've used sensors, but holy shit if I can essentially work off of the field as a static environment and have no reason to read real time peripheral data, I won't fucking use sensors.

Also, none of the judges as far as I can tell are technically minded, and the ones that are are a fucking god-send. Try explaining functional command architectures to some random volunteering parent who doesn't know common computing lingo.

Anyway, those are just some peeves I have against FTC, it's a been a while since the last season so I barely even fucking care about FIRST.

If anything my experiences in FIRST just make me look forward to EECS in university even more.

File: dabb_will_set_you_free.png (214KB, 546x304px) Image search: [Google]

214KB, 546x304px

Oh yeah, another thing, during the last competition me and the rest of the team were essentially all white, male, had dark colored hair, and were around 6 feet tall.

We were asked multiple times by judges "why don't we have girls on our team", and we answered truthfully, stating that all the girls are underclassmen and therefore in the other team.

However, it got on my nerves a bit, and something I do take not of in retrospect.

The thing about this feminist bullshit in robotics and tech overall is the fact that it's allegations of sexism are completely unfounded, and there perceptions are merely a result of natural fact, however good luck getting that through their heads before they send off with the practical Stasi.

>>9138113
note* of

their* perceptions

> I just woke up, forgive me.