Links and Tools for the team
The orgranization that puts together the competitions and infrastructure for us is FIRST (which means "For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology"). They coordinate competitions for many skill levels and types, so here's a direct link to the page for our section, the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). This is the page to check for announcements about our competition task.
There's a well made video about FIRST and the different competitions on a page called RoboLeague Documentary that showcases the 2015 FIRST Championship. It's well worth the 50 minutes of time to watch.
There's a calendar of important FRC dates on the site.
####Important Dates for us Saturday, January 9, 2016, 10:30-11:30 AM (ET) (9:30-10:30 Central). 2016 FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff. This is when we find out all the technical details of what our robot needs to accomplish. This is also when we can start building our competition robot. Up to thus point all we can do is work on prototype robots.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016, 11:59 PM (Central). Stop Build time. All teams must stop work on the robot and seal it, using the bag and tag provided in the 2016 Kit of Parts. So, we have 45 days to design, build, program, and test our robot. Then, it needs to be trapped in a bag until...
Wednesday, April 6 to Saturday, April 9, 2016. Competition! In Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota. So, after 6 weeks of being isolated and alone, we let our robot loose on our competition. There are about 60 teams registered for our competition. During the same time, there will also be 60 more teams competing across the street from where we are, in Mariucci Arena.
- FRC Blog is the official blog of the FIRST Robotics Competition. It contains helpful answers to various questions teams have submitted about rules. They occasionally make posts about competition rules changes before the competition starts.
- Chief Delphi is a unofficial discussion forum used to discuss the FIRST Robotics Competition. It contains plenty of gossip, but appears to have a lot of helpful information on technical matters as well.
- FIRST Forums is the offical FIRST forums, the place for official discussions about FIRST programs and mission. It is not used nearly as much as Chief Delphi.
- reddit /r/FRC is a subreddit for anything and everything related to the FIRST Robotics Competition.
- The Blue Alliance - FRC team information, event results, and videos
- They also have a great Android app
- Private team chatroom:
- Java
- Java 8 is installed on the RoboRIO and to take advantage of all the features it offers, it is suggested that you use Java 8 on your development system.
- Java SE 8 Downloads
- You will need the Java SE Development Kit (JDK) 8
- Eclipse
- Eclipse is the application we use to write and test our code. It has many features that make it more nicer to use over for example, a standard text editor, like code completion, error detection, and project organization.
- You only need to install the "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers"
- It is recommended to use the installer provided here:
- Git
- Git is the verison control system we use. It allows colaboration between team members and keeps track of changes to the code.
- Eclipse has a Git client built in which is what we will use most of the time
- There is also the normal command line Git client or GUI based ones like these:
- OpenRIO - A group of people have been working on tools and libraries that will help make building robots for the the FRC easier and more flexible. They have several projects that we'll be using for this season's competition, including:
- Toast - An expandable, Open Source and Cross-Platform Robot API for FRC built on WPILib
- HotPlate - CLI for the creation of Toast modules
- WPILib
- The WPI Robotics library (WPILib) is a set of software classes that interfaces with the hardware and software in your FRC robot’s control system.
- This is the offical library for use with FRC.