General Information
Software Setup
Contributors:
Larry Hiller, Oscar Jorgenson
Larry Hiller, Oscar Jorgenson
This page will help students get access to the software that we use on our teams.
Once you are on the team, we will add you to our Google space using your Nichols email address. We use google for 5 things.
We store our media files and a couple other things in the Google Drive.
We use the Google Chat App to do team communication. You should download this app onto your phone and turn on the notification feature.
We use a Google calendar to track our team events including contests and outreach opportunities.
We use Google Sites to store and update our institutional knowledge.
We use YouTube to share our team's videos and host our podcast.
Our team has been using GitHub for years as a storage solution and collaboration tool for the code we write for our robots, websites and apps. We recently decided to expand our usage of GitHub to use their project planning functionality to track progress on our goals with our teams.
If you do not have an account, go to github.com and click sign up. We recommend entering your personal E-mail as many people need this account later in their engineering careers.
Enter a password, then a username (ex. OscarJorgenson), and verify that you are human.
You are now in and will need to change your display name (profile icon -> settings -> public profile -> name) to your first name (ex. Oscar, James B).
Finally, message Mr. Hiller your username. Your invite will come via email. Once you are in the Nichols org, the functionality we are using for project management is the "projects" feature.
Note: when the projects tab is clicked, it will by default go to recently viewed, but this isn't useful for those who haven't viewed anything yet. Click on "projects" to see everything. If you want to, look around at what we have so far. These are the projects we plan on working on this summer, and they are all labeled by skillset, so you can play to your strengths. We encourage you to add your name to things, or if you see a task missing, add it altogether.
AppSheet is a Google product that lets you quickly create mobile apps with a GUI interface. These apps can interface directly with other google apps, including Google Sheets. in 2023 we started experimenting with writing our Scouting Apps for FTC and FRC in AppSheet. This has worked out very well. In the Spring of 2024, we decided that we wanted to expand our use of AppSheet to track student data and do our inventory management. Everyone on our team should download the Appsheet app onto their phones. You will be expected to log into the student data app weekly, and you will use the inventory app and scouting apps often.