[FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

My fellow Mentor and I are at odds on using encoders or not.

I want to hear from you.

Does your team use them or not? and why?

Go!

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

We love them. With the right code, they work wonders. We have code that allows us to move all the way up to a .001 of an inch, not that we need.. haha.:P

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

Can you provide some examples of what scenario you had the need to use them and what problem it solved?

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

I don't think this question can be asked so broadly.

They're hugely necessary in some instances, useless and redundant in others.

You should analyze your situations and decide what's best for it.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

I just wish the things weren't so insanely expensive and fragile.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

We've never had good luck with them, they are not accurate. Program it to go to the same spot every time, but it rarely does. I also agree they are too delicate. I just don't understand why Tetrix can't come out with a DC motor with a good encoder built in.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

How did you verify that your positioning was accurate to within .001"?

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

We avoid them for navigation and positioning of mechanisms. They are delicate, readings are unreliable, and they are bulky enough that they move the applied load out to the end of the motor shaft. That said, we used one with great success a few years ago. We had an arm that needed to move at a constant slow speed regardless of load or position. Adding an encoder changed that arm from unwieldy to elegant.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

I agree, there are times when you need them to control speed when under load. Another way to accomplish the same thing is to gear the arm down to 1:9 or some such.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

We are doing a Mechanum drive for Block Party this year, using the very affordable VEX mechanum plastic hub wheels. We need the encoders to allow the mechanum drive controling S/W to function properly. BTW, for their price, these wheels work very well, if you can come up with a hub scheme for them that eliminates the tiny square shaft in favor of a sturdier one.

I agree that the Tetrix scheme for externally adding encoders is horrible, and exposes them to far too much stress and damage, usually in a very short amount of time. It forces gears & sprockets to be mounted further away from the motor gearbox, where they will tend to more easily & quickly damage it, or where they will cause the motor to shift position in the not-so-solid of a design TETRIX motor mount clamp.

Even when the encoders themselves are not internally damaged, the lack of a strain relief at the point where their wire assembly enters their micro-connector causes early failures of the wiring assembly there too.

When you combine the other TETRIX scheme for a motor with an eccentric output shaft as a way for adjusting gear & sprocket spacing, this adds even more problems for preventing the encoder wires from breaking at the connector, as the moter gets twisted in the mount clamp.

We have used urethane and silicone glue to make strain reliefs and to glue wires to side of motor case. we also use lots of ties to keep encoder wires out of harms way as much as possible.

The VEX motors with internal encoders are so much more appealing, but just too weak for most of our needs.

-Dick Ledford

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

For example for last years FTC. The robot sits in the corner of the field. Autonomous starts. IR turns on, finds out which column the IR is on, then picks out of three programs, which one to run to make it to the IR. Ok, say its the left column, robot makes a left 45 degree turn, goes 15 inches, right 45 degree turn, 20 or so inches forward, stops, lift goes up, which also has an encoder to tell it how many turns, to make it to that height, then 5 inches in, placing the ring on the peg, lift goes down a few inches, robot backs up 10 inches, does a 135 degree turn to face the ring dispenser. Ready for teleop.

With our code as well, I could move the robot to tile, carpet, concrete, asphalt, etc. And it would still do the same exact thing the program tells it to. Other than a few teams that I have seen with advanced code, most teams run off time, which with time, just with the wear and tear of some foam tiles, or brand new tiles, along with battery powered, wither fully charged, or somewhat charged, can change the autonomous sooooooo much.

If you write your code right, it works. With what we have written, it takes us less than a few minutes to write a code, or 30 minutes to write a very precise code. (and extremely easy once written. One of our new programmers, never seen code before, is writing the autonomous this year,(one day of teaching the basics) only having to list down how many inches,degrees turned,and lifting height)

The code is written in such a way, that it tells me on the NXT brick and computer screen, how far its traveled for each step it does, granted, there is no reason for that precision, especially this year, so we changed only go to the .1 of an inch really.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

I don't think that answered the question Madison was asking.

There's a difference between what the sensor on your robot says and how far the vehicle actually moved.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

Ok, yes there is that fact of that robot could have gone a little under or over that number. Again, there really is no reason for programming that far, and hard to even get that measurement in real time, without looking at the computer. I was just stating the fact that the program could do it if it really wanted to. Right now in our programming, we do give a tolerance area for the code to decided if its in the right place without it getting stuck on a certain step. Its just stupid not to have your program run through all the steps because of a small.1 of an inch. I think right now, our programmer has it to a .1 or .15 of a tolerance, as there is really no need for huge precision this year, unlike last year with the pegs and such.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

As a pre-kickoff project, you might want to try this:

1) Command your robot to move exactly 20 feet forward and stop.

2) Using a tape measure, determine how far it actually traveled.

3) I think you may find the results surprising.

Re: [FTC]: Motor encoders Love'em? or leave'em?
 

I will have to students try that out today. I shall post the results tonight.