I’m looking at getting a XRP for myself as a mentor on a team to learn more about coding our robot - which I don’t currently participate in with our team now. I’m looking at doing this off-season because we already eat-sleep-build for the next few weeks and I’m not sure where I would fit it in.
The activity in this forum doesn’t seem to be a lot - I was curious if there are any other resources to follow (Discord, etc) from a FIRST perspective to help with this robot that might be useful for me to join.
The programming training that is available via FIRST uses either a Romi or XRP robot as the basis for the training. I personally have two XRPs and a Romi that i am using to try to better understand the issues the programmers on our team run into. Some of the issues are documentation related and some are the ever changing Java resources they use. Some of the course materials actually seem to be deprecated already. I would type in the exact code in the course example and the VS Code AI would tell me to use s more current version of the library. This, just after doing an update on all code involved.
The XRPs and Romis can be a good tool to learn the basics.
A lot of what goes for the big robots goes for the XRP/Romi, so the WPILib docs are also good.
If you have some programming skills already then you can still be a helpful mentor while learning the WPILib on the job. A lot of the Java fundamentals are still necessary to teach to the students and even being able to walk them through a stack trace is super valuable to a team. The docs are also very good so you could help students look things up and learn at the same time.
As the only programming mentor on a small team I’d be overjoyed if there was another parent who had some skills and wanted to learn during the season!
Our team used the XRPs for a summer camp (with Blockly which worked well for our purpose) and are transitioning them to helping learn coding with WPI Lib/Java. There are template and example projects already available. We have had good experience with the WPI Lib info and the youtube videos FIRSTinMichigan have published. Ironically controllers have been our biggest issue and we learned the hard way to check the version of the controller if you are going to purchase some!