[Mr. Lim]

360 controllers are notoriously bad when it comes to center-positions.

I've been on 3 teams the past 3 years, and with each team I've had to expend a lot of energy convincing students that XBOX controllers simply aren't as good as the Logitech Dual Action or F310 alternatives for FRC purposes. The values that XBOX controllers put out don't reliably return to center.

You could add code to increase your deadband, but it takes away your useable resolution on your joystick. Most of your joystick movement in the middle will become useless. And if you compensate for it, you will ramp up from 0 to max over a very small distance, without much resolution.

Driving an FRC robot is not like *most* video games: you don't jam your controls to full-blast in every direction if you actually expect to drive at a world class level. The difference between pushing a joystick forward 13% vs 14% is the difference between scoring/dropping a tube. Consider this when you take away all values between 0-30%, or increment by 5% because you are managing a huge deadband on your controller.

I'd highly recommend one of the Logitech controllers mentioned. They tend to give nice clean numbers, and even recalibrate/center each time you plug/unplug them (which is why you should never touch the sticks while plugging them in!)

The only drawback to the Logitech gamepads is that the stick motion has a circular profile. Great for drivers, because they feel really smooth whipping around the extents. But programmers need to compensate for the fact that they will never hit the "corners" of the XY-Cartesian plane. You may never hit full speed/power if you don't account for this.





Or you could just tell your driver to drive tank-drive. That's a pretty good 5:00am solution to a joystick that uncontrollably drifts to the right.