We’ll be writing little Arduino programs in C++, which is similar to the Java programming language we’ll use to program the big robots.

We’ll have a few loner computers available, but if you have your own laptop, it really helps to bring it in to the meeting.  Better yet, you can get a jump on things by preinstalling the software from https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software .

Here’s a short video introduction to Arduino:

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnf8ojsK6S4[/embedyt]

On a Friday in January after moving into our new location at the mall, our programming team figured out how to control last years robot with a guitar-shaped controller, known for its use in popular video games. After we learned to control our robot with the guitar, it became quite the team bonding experience. “It was the coolest thing ever” said Amy, a marketing member “We were working on chairmans and talking about what we could talk about and I looked behind me and I just pointed at it.”

Our team hopes to implement this design on future projects. Stay Flaming.

We all have a good idea about how fast our personal computers are, but it’s less obvious how consumer machines compare to our robot’s cRIO processor or to external processors like the Raspberry Pi.