[Chris Hibner]

I'm going to start out:

1) I want to be able to command the gyro calibration routine via a boolean input to some "Cal Gyro" VI. It's hard to guarantee the robot is perfectly still right after power up, especially with all of the demands of the field reset crew. They want your robot on right away so it can link to the field ASAP, and I don't blame them.

For all of our other sensors, we reset them when the driver selects a new autonomous routine from the driver station. We do this because we can guarantee when no one is touching the robot. Our coach/driver sets up the robot on the field, turns is on, then moves it around a lot until it's in the proper position. Sensors may be out of whack at this point due to the movement. As soon as our humans leave the playing field, the driver changes the autonomous routine which triggers all of our sensor resets. At this time, I would also like to kick-off the bias-calculation (i.e. calibration) routine for any inertial sensors, or any other analog sensors.

2) I want an "Encoder Get" VI that will read multiple encoders at the SAME TIME. Yes, there are other ways to try and make this happen, but it's not obvious for a lot of LabVIEW newbies. At one point this year we couldn't figure out why our robot's heading was always off in autonomous mode. Then we figured out is was due to the timing of the encoder reads. The code was reading the right encoder, then arm and elevator, then it would execute the arm and elevator control, then it would finally get around to reading the left encoder and execute the heading and position determination. All that time between reading the left and right encoders caused the left encoder to read about 0.25 inches higher than the right, even though the left and right side of the drive system went the same distance. Because of this, the robot thought it had turned to the right, so it would start turning to the left to compensate. After we figured out what was going on, we reconfigured the software to guarantee the left and right encoders would be read back-to-back, but it would be nice to have a large "get" to read all encoders simultaneously.

One last thing: Last year I asked for a status bar on the imaging tool, and I noticed that there was great status feedback this year. Thanks a LOT! I've been meaning to say thanks all throughout this year, but I kept forgetting by the time I got to CD.