I was in charge of the programming for the school's FLL team for 5 years, from 2019 to 2023. This is where my programming journey began. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot, and I wanted to share some of the highlights here. I have unfortunately forgotten a lot of the details.
The last season of FLL for me.
Went fully with micropython (main.py) and it paid off. We still had accuracy problems, which is why I did some debugging with gyro graphing (./graphtest/). Managed to get it decently accurate, but still had hiccups: sometimes from dirty wheels, dirty mat, balance, lag, etc. Felt good enough about it to share it on github also (./code/).
It was the first year with the double base, which made us make a horrible mistake: I remember that during the competition, we realized that our school mat was positioned wrong so all of our code was slightly off and even though we tried to fix it with limited time, the robot never did what it was supposed to, so we did not make it to finals.
The best design we ever had.
This season's code/media has been mostly lost on my end. We possibly went back to EV3 and used pybricks (main.py) and kept it simple.
I don't have any media to back this up, but I think we went back to the EV3, because of issues with the spike prime, but not sure.
COVID was in full effect so I took the robot home and had a lot of time to experiment with it. If I remember correctly, at the start of the season I tried to code the robot with the official SPIKE prime python app (skeleton.llsp, which translates to skeleton.py), but it was too slow, especially with gyro steering, which lead me to the lower level micropython (./FLLReplay/). Around that time, experiments with Linux and programming in general were starting to get also quite active. We might have gone back to the official app still this year, because directly using micropython on the spike prime was very experimental back then, but I don't remember for sure.
The LEGO Spike Prime just came out and fortunately the school got a bunch of them, so we had a huge advantage and together with the extra time and the finale being online, we won some good awards.
The first year that I was the main programmer. I used EV3 LEGO mindstorms programming blocks to program the movement of the robot. Around this time, I started also learning my first programming language at home - Python and soon started experimenting with arduinos. Kept the robot code still very simple, didn't experiment too much, but used some helper function blocks:
S6itmine_otse- block that drove the robot decently straight for a given distance in centimeters with the gyro.Gyroangle- block that turned the robot a given amount of degrees with the gyro.
Unfortunately this is lost media. That year I wasn't the programmer, but I do remember using EV3 blocks to code.