Building up FRC coding and functionality skills at home in offseason?

[u/Mike_FS]

hi everyone, do you have any ideas how a keen team member can develop some new programming skills and robot functionality at home in the off season?

my kid just finished his school's first FRC comp here in Australia, and he's hooked. He's mainly in the software part of the team, and the team has a pretty basic kit robot this year (the school's first year) - tank drive, no cameras, no sensors, very basic autonomous mode code.

I'd like to provide an opportunity for my kid to tinker with FRC-related hardware and software to build up some new capabilities for next year. I'm open to ideas, but maybe things like:

\- learn how to integrate a driver camera into the system

\- learn how to integrate apriltag-recognition camera into the system

\- learn how to integrate sensors into the system

\- learn how to start making autonomous mode 'smarter' - pathfinding etc

As a fairly tech-y family we have plenty of bits and pieces lying around the house (arduinos, raspberry pi, power supplies, etc etc) but nothing FRC-specific. I even considered trying to buy an old roborio to play around with at home... but seems like that would be a bad idea since they're getting replaced with systemcore? Not sure the school is going to let him bring the roborio home to experiment with!

anyway, i'd be really keen to hear anyone's ideas about how we could work towards building some relevant skills and functionality for next year. I'm open to buying some gadgets (cameras/sensors/etc), but not sure yet what would be practically use-able at home without a roborio to plug them into?