Join the team

Welcome to the FRC 4931 team! This page outlines some of the things that you'll want to do to become fully involved. Also check out our information for parents.

The services we use

We use a couple of online services:

• Google Group for group discussions and information. This works just like email, except that you send your email to [email protected] and it will be sent to the whole group. And just reply to any email you get from the group. No worrying about individual email addresses.
• GitHub.com as an online repository of files, pictures, tasks, documentation, and any code we want to open source.
• A shared calendar with all of our meetings and planned events. You can view it online or add it to your calendar application that supports iCal (see below).

Getting set up

To join the team, there are a couple of steps you need to perform:

1. Officially join the team by going to the official FIRST Robotics Competition site, creating a student account, and joining team 4931.
2. Fill out the paperwork for the Edwardsville Robotics club; see one of the mentors to get the paperwork.
3. Join our Google Group by sending an email to frc4931 at gmail.com and requesting an invitation. Please include in that email your full name and your parents' names.
4. Create a free account on GitHub.com, and then email frc4931 at gmail.com to request access to the repository. Then go to https://github.com/frc-4931/2014/ and look for the "Watch" or "Unwatch" pull-down button near the upper left corner of the page; click that and choose "Watching" to receive emails about all the changes on our GitHub site or "Not Watching" to only receive emails for discussions in which you are participating or are @ mentioned.
5. If you use a calendar application that supports iCal, copy [this link to our iCal feed] (https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/frc4931%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics) and then:

• For Outlook, follow the instructions for subscribing.
• For Apple iCal on OS X see this tutorial -- if you are using calendar syncing with iCloud on your Mac and iOS devices, doing this on your Mac should automatically add your calendar to your iOS devices.
• For other applications, follow the instructions for subscribing to an "iCal" calendar feed in your application.

Tools and applications

There are are some tools and applications that you may want to install locally on your laptop or computer. These are not required, and not all students will need them.

• The GitHub for Mac or GitHub for Windows desktop applications allow you to upload and manage the files and code in our repository. All other GitHub functionality (wiki, issues, reading files/code, etc.) is all accessible online via your browser.
• National Instruments LabVIEW FRC 2013 is the graphical programming environment used to program the robots. This is only installable via a CD (see Mr. Johnson), but once installed it should download the updates. At this time, our team is only using LabVIEW.
• Wind River C/C++ environment is the development environment for using the C/C++ languages to program the robots. This is only installable via a CD (see Mr. Johnson). At this time, our team is not using C/C++, but we plan to consider it after the 2014 competition.
• Java FRC Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is available online. At this time, our team is considering using Java.