<< The Fribotte Homepage >>
[Home] [Who are we?] [Robot] [Tech DB] [e=m6 cup] [Forum] [Reports] [Links]

The FAQ


 Frequently asked questions about the team and our robot
The aim of this page is to answer to the questions that people frequently ask to us by mail or the forum.

 What does "Fribotte" mean ?
 When we were searching the name of the team, during our first meeting, a member of the team suggested "Freebot", in order to symbolize a free robot (in the sense of a robot free of charge). It resulted in a joke about the spelling of the word: in fact, the french pronounciation of "Fribotte", is exactely the same as "freebot" in english ;)

 Why do you reveal your strategy ?
  We could ask the question in another way : why wouldn't we reveal our strategy ?

 First of all, we can say that in a competition way of thinking, it is not a disadavantage. After all, if someone wants to know the strategy of a team, he or she only needs to watch the first match of this team diring the competition. But this is not the most important (we do not have any pretention concerning the cup itself).
We want to defend the idea of an "open" cup, sympathetic and where the competition is a aspect which is stimulating but not necessary. To sum up, we build a robot which works or not, we make the robots meet together, but our first goal is to have fun.

 This definition of the cup is defended by ANSTJ (most of us have participated in the organization of the cup last year or before).
 This year, We wanted to build a robot, but in order to incite the teams to exchange information together we decided to make all the evolution of our robot available for anybody through this web site. We are not the first to do it (see our links page), and we have already done it when we have participated at school.

  Of course, we do not ask all the teams to do like us, but we hope they'll do it (it's already the case for several of them!) or at least that they'll do it after the competition. Most of all, these information exchanges will result in more powerfull robots, but without having a huge budget.

 To sum up, we hope that this way of thinking will make the cup even more sympathetic, taking a distance far from a competition spirit.

 How do you manage your budget ?
For the moment, we do not have any real account. Each one of us will pay a few money (except for the tools that any member buys for himselfor herself).

If one day we have a sponsor, we will try to build an association to have a bank account. The subscription (with status to provide) to build an association seems to be about 253FF in France.

 How did you make your forum ? Can we have the source code ?
As shown by the URL, the forum was written using the PHP3 language (for more information about PHP3, please go to the PHP3 site). More precisely, each message and information about this message are stored in a MySQL database which is consulted and updated by the script.

For the moment, this forum is in his test phase, but we expect to provide the source code when it will be quite reliable (Note from the author : I must allow it, I feel ashamed of the code I wrote, and it is quite unreadable for the moment :) So, to be continued soon on the site :)

Nevertheless, there exists a well made forum (much more featured than mine), w_agora. You will find it here(w_agora allows to manage many forums and provides many management features). This forum is also made using PHP3 and a database (MySQL or other).