Month: January 2011

2011 FRC game

So this is the start of the 2011 FRC game.  We are about 4 days into the season right now, and if our team stays on schedule, which it seems that it will, then we should start CADing the robot today.

Being the programming leader of the team, my main responsibilities at this point is to start getting the systems ready, so that when the robot is built it can be quickly programmed, and to also start programming when we start to know the design of the robot.

Seeing that the first task of prepping the system should not end up taking that long, this should give me the chance to help with the mini bot.  Having been concerned for the building of the minibot, and the only leader figure without major responsibility at the present moment/Experience with FTC.  I should be able to start CADing the minibot soon with the rest of the team.  I think that the minibot is going to become less about making one design and being able to stick with it, but after initial CADs, being able to quickly go through design changes, to try and knock a few seconds off the climb and deploy time of the minibot.

In all I think that this is going to be a good season of FRC, the major problem is going to come down to if we are able to get the robot done with enough time so that we can practice driving it.  This is going to end up being a critical portion of our success, along with the time to test and “debug” the system.

npm/coffee update

It seems to be that I have not updated this jsapp blog in a while.  If you care about getting updates you should definitely join the jsapp mailing list where I tend to be announcing new features.  https://groups.google.com/group/jsapp-us

There seems to be a few features that have happened since the last update of this blog, so I am going to try and cover them all in a list now:

  1. There is not support for using a custom subdomain, check out the deploy command
  2. There is a profile view for all users, the profile can be edited using the profile command
  3. Files can be made public for other users to include into their own projects, to do so use the files command and click public
  4. There is a new jsapp command that can be installed using npm (npm install jsapp) this is useful for anyone that wants to work with jsapp through their own filesystem on their computer, or  use version control on their own system
  5. jsapp now has support for coffee script (demo) all one has to do to take advantage of this is to add the suffix .coffee to any file and it will be compiler with the coffee compiler prior to running

Again if you what to be kept up-to-date on the new features of jsapp, check out the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/jsapp-us