FAQ

Robotics is inherently a multidisciplinary field, and people from several fields will be involved with most robotics projects.

There are several majors here at Cal Poly which are directly involved in robotics:

• Computer science – computer programming is a very critical part of robotics.

• Electrical engineering – EE's design the hardware in robots and participate in system integration.

• Computer engineering – this major is a balance between computer science and EE which can be applied very well to robotics, and robotics is emphasized as an application in many CPE courses.

• Mechanical engineering – mechanical engineers learn system design, dynamics, controls, and other critical skills; also, ME has a mechatronics concentration which is specifically designed to teach skills of modern smart product design.

It's not really fair to say that one of these majors has more involvement in robotics than others; they work together, approaching the same problem of robotic design from different sides. The choice of majors should be based on the skills for which the student has the greatest affinity – design (creative), analysis (math), programming (organization), etc.

Also, a student can usually change between engineering majors (with reasonably good grades) after one or two years at Poly, so there's little need to worry about which major to choose.

Membership is open to any Cal Poly student, regardless of year, major, or experience. The only real requirement is a desire to learn more about robotics! It is $30/year to become a member, which gets you a club T-shirt and pays for pizza at meetings. To become a member, just show up at one of our general meetings or Saturday build sessions and talk to a club officer. You can check our homepage for upcoming meeting dates/times, but we also send out meeting announcements with more details via our Google Group, so make sure you subscribe (see the FAQ below for how to do that).

No, you can become a member at any time by paying the $30/year membership dues. The year period starts in Fall quarter, so most people join at the first Fall meeting or soon after. Therefore, joining later just means that you get less days of membership for the same dues. If you are joining very late, talk to the president and treasurer. Prorated dues might be a possibility depending on the circumstances, but that is up to the officers to decide.

For our typical meeting time/location and a map, please see Meetings.

For this quarter's meeting schedule, see the homepage.

Also, it is always best to check the Google Group to see the latest info in case the meeting was canceled. This will also tell you what to expect at each meeting.

Yes, you can still join. By subscribing to the Google Group to receive announcements and by checking the homepage and Meeting Minutes, you can see what you missed at the meetings and stay updated. Ideally you should attend both the general meetings and the Saturday build sessions, but if you can only make it to one or the other due to schedule conflicts, just come to the ones that you can. Since the main focus and benefit of the club is to gain hands-on project experience, we highly encourage you to find a project that you can contribute to. Project teams often hold their own project meetings and they decide for themselves when they want to meet, so try to find a project that meets at a good time for you, or consider starting your own project. Programmers may be able to work independently and communicate via email/chat/VOIP. Or you can just wait until the next quarter and plan your class schedule around the club meeting times. We try to send out an email before the registration period to remind everyone to keep their Tuesday 11am-noon and Saturday 10am-2pm time slots free. Regardless, you should expect to spend a lot of time on a project, so you may also want to consider taking less units if you have difficult classes or arranging to take EE/CPE/CSC 400 to get 4 units for your project work.

No, since most students do not attend Cal Poly's summer quarter, we have not held general meetings or club events during the summer. However, the club room might be occasionally accessible depending on whether an officer or project leader with a room key is planning to work in the room during the summer. Project team members should keep in touch with each other and may decide to work on their project independently over the summer.

To join the mailing list just enter your email in the registration box below and click Subscribe.

Email:

You will receive announcements about general club meetings, project work days, club events, new projects that are starting up, and other robotics-related topics by email. Only officers and project leaders can send to the list (and replies are only received by the officers), so you won't get too many emails. If you'd like to see what kind of messages you'll be receiving you can browse our past messages without needing to subscribe.

No, you have a few options. Although we highly recommend that all active members subscribe and receive emails directly, you can also:

• Subscribe and select the digest mode. This is good for non-involved people that only want occasional updates.
• Access the announcement emails using an RSS/Atom feed reader. See our Google Group Feeds.
• Check the homepage periodically. It displays the 8 most recent email topics via a feed, cached hourly.
• Check Google Groups periodically.

The Google Group provides an unsubscribe feature, so you can remove yourself at any time without needing to contact us. There are two options:

• Send an email from your subscribed address to calpolyrobotics+unsubscribe [at] googlegroups [dot] com
• If your email is registered as a google account, you can login to Google Groups and edit your membership.

If you also joined any project google groups, you will need to unsubscribe from those separately in the same fashion.

We generally don't approve new wiki accounts unless you are a club member or club alum. However, any Cal Poly student can become a member (see above FAQ How can I join the Robotics Club?). You only need a wiki account if you want to create or edit pages on this wiki website. However, we encourage all members to join a project and contribute to that project's wiki page to share the project details with others. There are a few pages that might require an account or special permissions to access them, such as sensitive competition projects or the Members Only section, but that section is really more oriented towards officers. Most of the site is publicly viewable, so basically you don't need to create an account unless you want to make edits.

If you are just interested about the club and not yet a member, you want to join the mailing list, not create a wiki account. The mailing list is open to the public as it is announcements-only.

1. Read the above FAQ first to ensure that you are eligible for an account.
2. Register for an account (you must be a CPRC member or alum).
3. Wait for approval from the webmaster or officers. You may want to contact them at a meeting or via email at calpolyrobotics [dash] officers [at] googlegroups [dot] com to expedite your request.
4. Read the guidelines below in the next FAQ!
5. Once approved, you might need to logout and login again to get the edit privileges.

• Simply go to the page that you want to edit and click the “Edit this page” button at the bottom.
• PLEASE use the Preview button before saving your changes, and use the Save button sparingly. Repeatedly saving the page to tweak the formatting will flood the inbox of the webmaster and anyone subscribed to page changes as well as generate useless revisions in the page history.
• Try to fill in a quick summary of what you changed in the “Edit summary” box before saving. This makes the page revision history easier to look though. Page revision history can be viewed by clicking the “Old Revisions” button located at the footer of the page.
• To create a new page, simply make a link from an existing page to a new unique page name. The link then shows up red because the page doesn't exist yet. Click the red link and create the page.
• Every page should have one and only one H1 heading, at the very beginning of the page. This is important because it defines the title of the page displayed in the titlebar, and links to the page will use it as their link text unless overridden. The rest of the page should use H2 headings for its main sections, and subsequently lower numbers for subheadings.
• Each project should have its own namespace (the namespace is the name before the colon in a link, ie: spybot:start). Namespaces are like a subfolder and help organize content by keeping all the pages and media for a project in one place. The only exception to this rule is that sponsor logos should be uploaded to the sponsors namespace rather than within the project's namespace. Projects can also use sub-namespaces as needed.
• The main page for each namespace or project must be called “start”, and should contain the links necessary to reach the other pages within the namespace.
• Try not to post information that inherently changes as time passes. For example, instead of stating your age you might say what year you were born. Or instead of saying you are a freshman/sophomore/junior/senior, you might say your expected graduation date.
• To learn the DokuWiki syntax, please refer to the Formatting Syntax page. There is also a link to this reference whenever you are in edit mode.
• Another way to learn the DokuWiki syntax is to look at the formatting used by some of our well established pages and older projects and then copy their formatting code. Copying the formatting style of existing projects helps maintain a consistent style across all pages of the site.
• Before making changes to the site, use the PlayGround page to experiment with the DokuWiki syntax until you understand it.

Ask the club officers via email at calpolyrobotics [dash] officers [at] googlegroups [dot] com.