Join the team

Welcome to the FRC 4931 team! This page outlines some of the things that you'll want to do to become fully involved. Also check out our information for parents.

The services we use

We use a couple of online services:

• Google Group for group discussions and information. This works just like email, except that you send your email to frc-4931-info@googlegroups.com and it will be sent to the whole group. And just reply to any email you get from the group. No worrying about individual email addresses.
• GitHub.com as an online repository of files, pictures, tasks, documentation, and any code we want to open source.
• A shared calendar with all of our meetings and planned events. You can view it online or add it to your calendar application that supports iCal (see below).

Getting set up

To join the team, there are a couple of steps you need to perform:

1. Officially join the team by going to the FRC Student TIMS website, creating a student account, and joining team 4931. (Mentors should instead go to the FRC TIMS website.)
2. Fill out the paperwork for the Edwardsville Robotics club; see one of the mentors to get the paperwork.
3. If you're not yet a member of our Google Group, please send an email to frc4931 at gmail.com and requesting an invitation. Please include in that email your full name and your parents' names. (Also, please encourage one of your parents to sign up, too, so they know what's going on with the group.)
4. Create a free account on GitHub.com, and then email frc4931 at gmail.com and tell us what your GitHub username is so we can give you access to our pages. Then go to https://github.com/frc-4931/2014/ and look for the "Watch" or "Unwatch" pull-down button near the upper left corner of the page; click that and choose "Watching" to receive emails about all the changes on our GitHub site or "Not Watching" to only receive emails for discussions in which you are participating or are @ mentioned.
5. If you use a calendar application that supports iCal, copy [this link to our iCal feed] (https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/frc4931%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics) and then:

• For Outlook, follow the instructions for subscribing.
• For Apple iCal on OS X see this tutorial -- if you are using calendar syncing with iCloud on your Mac and iOS devices, doing this on your Mac should automatically add your calendar to your iOS devices.
• For iOS devices, navigate to this page in Safari and copy this link: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/frc4931%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics. Then go to "Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Add Account", then select "Other -> Add Subscribed Calendar" and paste the link to the iCal feed. Finally, touch "Save".
• For other applications, follow the instructions for subscribing to an "iCal" calendar feed in your application.

Tools and applications

There are are some tools and applications that you may want to install locally on your laptop or computer. These are not required, and not all students will need them.

• The GitHub for Mac or GitHub for Windows desktop applications allow you to upload and manage the files and code in our repository. All other GitHub functionality (wiki, issues, reading files/code, etc.) is all accessible online via your browser.
• Java FRC Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is available online. At this time, our team is using Java.
• PTC Creo is available for 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD). See our CAD page for more details.