M000: Introduction

About

There are quite a few things you will be able to learn from this documentation. However, you could read every single page here, all the linked sources, everything you can find on Chief Delphi, but if you don’t ever do the things you read about, then you will have missed the point. This documentation is not meant to be everything you need to know, it’s only half.

The rest is not something that can be boiled down into words and put onto a website, much less by me. The rest comes from trying all of it. The only way to get the rest is to do the things again and again. You will mess up, I can’t count the amount of times experienced mechanical members have broken drill bits [1]. Mess up, learn from your mistakes and you will be doing everything right. Try doing the things you haven’t done before, and I promise you will get better at things so much faster.

FRC is a very interesting group of people. We build robots from scratch in two months while balancing it with school work. Everyone is capable of doing the things we do. Everyone here is capable and does a tremendous amount to help the team. Ask Questions! You have the capability to do anything anyone else is, the only difference is you haven’t learned it yet. Asking questions can be hard, because you must admit you don’t know. Trust me, the awkwardness of learning is more than worth than the payoff of knowing. Anyone on this team is happy to pass down their knowledge and help you grow. All you have to do is ask, and you shall recieve.

Structure

This documentation is organized in a way that may be confusing at first, but after a bit of explanation it will all make sense. You may have noticed the M000 in the title of this page. Every page in this section has been given a 3 digit code. The first digit is either 0 or 1. It is 0 for more abstract pages and 1 for more content focused ones. The second digit differentiates content focused pages. If it is 0, it is core content; these are things you should definetly know. If it is 1, it is more detailed and specific content; these things are nice to know. In addition, the reST and html file are named with the code.

Each page, other than this one, will have a summary and a further reading section. The summary will explain what that page covers, and the further reading section will detail other sources for more information, or sources from which the page was written.

Footnotes

[1]	Actually, I can! Here’s a list: Ritvik Jain - 5 (One season), Zachary Friedman-Hill - 1. Not a single new member has broken one!