[Joe Ross]

In order to keep the matches going smoothly, it's important for your field crew to turn on your robot as soon as it gets on the field. However, it seem that many programs only open the gyro when the program first starts. If the robot is moved afterwards, it will use the power-on position as the starting position, and cause problems. Because of this, some teams are bringing their robot onto the field, then spending a minute lining the robot up, then turning the robot on, delaying the start of the match by the time it takes to line up the robot

There's an easy way to fix this. The first thing you do in autonomous, call gyro reset. This sets the heading to 0 right where the robot is at the beginning of autonomous. You can move your robot while it's on, without affecting the gyro that way. We've been doing this for years, but I've talked to many people at regionals this year that hadn't thought of doing this.

There is one caveat, your robot will need to be still while the gyro calibrates, which is typically 20-30 seconds after power up (if you open the gyro at the beginning of the program).

If you can't implement this in software (or don't want to deal with the caveat above), make sure your field crew knows where the reset button on the cRIO is. After aligning the robot, press the reset button on the cRIO, and it will only take 20-30 seconds to come up rather then the 1 minute or longer that it takes if you power cycle the whole robot. You can also hit the reboot robot button on the driver station to have the same affect.