Programming

At the beginning of the year, Steamounk was chosen as the Beta tester team with Mevo'ot Eiron for the new systems. In the preparation period the programming crew started learning the new program - "LabVIEW".
The learning proccess wasn't easy for the crew, and they needed to learn the program in a very short period of time. Most of the time the crew worked alone, and when they found a problem they were assisted by Eyal Hershko, one of our team mentors.
When we were told Steampunk is the first team to get the Beta Systems in Israel we were very excited, but on the other hand they felt obligated to utilize the opportunity they were given and to reach the highest level they can reach in the short time they have.
When the Beta Systems arrived we started working with it. We were amazed by the performances of the systems and enjoyed because the theoretical work became a practical and interesting work.
The proccess of learning the Beta was fascinating and commiting at the same time, considering the amount of teams we hosted and guided. We reached high level of knowledge with the program and guided as many teams the best way we could, while practising with making programs for the robot before the kickoff arrives.
At first, we wrote easy programs and as the time passed we progressed and our level advanced. Furthermore, we thought of the autonomous working technique of the previous years (2005, 2007, 2008). We did the writing ourselves, using the same programming language that was used last year.

During our preparation period we gladly helped different rookie teams from around the country who came to us for explanations and tutoring of the program. Usually the programming crew were the ones to come. We explained them how the program works, gave them harder assignments as more time passed, kept in touch, solved their problems and helped them progress.

At the day of the kickoff, when we were revealed to the new game and discovered that the friction's coefficient is very low, we understood that there is a problem with accelerating and started thinking of possible solutions. For example, there was an idea of controlling the accelerating of the robot with controlling the precents of power the engine gets by the third axis of the joystick.
Another idea was controlling the value the engine gets as a function of time periods.
In addition, strategy crew gave the programming crew some assignments for the autonomous program.