December 4 Demonstration
I gave this presentation in front of my technical communications class. If this lecture doesn't put the technical in technical communications, then I don't know what will. I won't have enough time to present everything that goes into programming the robot, the last time I did that the lecture lasted over two hours. This time I expect a lot out of the user. Knowledge in Linux, C programming, multithreading, and Git are pretty much essential. If you are lost already, glaze your eyes over right now. Having that said, let the fun begin ;).
In this lecture I will teach you a basic example on how to write your own frontend and backend code for the robot controller "roboler". To follow along I encourage you to download the example source which is hosted on my public git repository. To get the code you need Git, a distributed SCM which the robotics team uses. If you do not have git installed, or you are in class on a windows machine without SSH access back home. You can still follow along using gitweb.
If, in fact you do have git installed, clone the repository by issuing:
git clone http://schism.penguinflavored.com/~jesse/roboler.git roboler
Now, cd into your shiny new repository and checkout the example branch, then cd into the example subdirectory.
cd roboler git checkout -b local origin/example cd example
Now you are ready to follow along, the frontend code is located in example.c. The backend code is located in timer.c. Open up your favorite text editor and join in the fun. Get familiar with this code, make it your playground, and when you feel comfortable, you can start creating your own subsystem modules and frontends.
