2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

Hey all-

Team 2220 implemented this at the Central Illinois Regional when Team 4009 DNA told us about a super useful tool they wrote to code autonomous programs. They had their robot programmed in Python, so we spent the night transferring the code into Java and making it work with our setup.

https://github.com/DennisMelamed/FRC-Play-Record-Macro

Here's the gist: you press a button in teleop while you're practicing that records any motions you make into a .csv file stored on the roboRio. Then during autonomous, you have it read back that file, outputting the exact same values to your motors/other things. Easy to setup, create, and change autonomous programs quickly and without a lot of planning.

Thoughts/improvements? Big thanks to Team 4009 for the idea and their code in python (you can find the link to their code in the github readme)

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

Sounds cool.

Question:
Is it easy to go back and clean up some of the commands?

Say the driver didn't go forward enough on the first try and had to bump it a little. Is it easy to adjust for one smooth motion instead of two?

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

This sounds pretty neat and would be very useful. Nice work. Have you used this in competition? How has it gone?

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

We attempted this also, but could not get playback to work.

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

That would require accessing the csv file in the roboRio, which you can do by sshing into the roborio to the file you want. It would be kind of difficult, as the motor values are recorded multiple times a second, so there would be a whole lot of entries to sort through. It is possible though, and you could adjust them individually one by one using something like excel. The easier option would be to just re-record the auto program.

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

We have used this in competition, it works much better than trying to get the timing of all the motions down in the code :) It ended up being one of the few times our auto program did what we wanted it to.

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

What does the BTStorage class do? Is it important? It isn't in the repository.

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

Is there a version in labview?

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

Yes 2252 made a 3 tote auto using the same system in labview and was successful 11 out of 14 times

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

That's amazing!

Funny coincidence, too - the FLL team that I coached last year built pretty much exactly this, but it ran on an EV3 that was controlled via Bluetooth by another EV3. They ended up winning the Software Award at the Oregon State Championship, and you guys deserve to win something for this - it's a great piece of work.

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

Is it possible to get that program?

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

A BTStorage object has a bunch of motor constant values, port numbers, etc. We need access to it in our play/record classes because we are setting values to motors. If your code is set up differently, you won't need to pass it in.

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

Thanks! Team 4009 DNA really deserves the credit, those guys wrote some really awesome code.

Going to talk to our lead programmer about this. Being programming is our strong suit and next year we are losing him we need to explore different things before we lose him.

Re: 2220's Play/Record Macro for Autonomous
 

Yes it is. Here is the latest version of our 2015 code along with our 3 tote auto file. The file type that windows assigns the auto recording seems to be rather random but just open the file with a excel or an equivalent program with tab seperation and it should open fine.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-Q...ew?usp=sharing


Using recording and open office to edit the file we were able to develop our 3 tote auto in just a little over two hours.