[z_beeblebrox]

Last year, 4183 used no sensors on our robot except two limit switches at the ends of the turret travel and the pressure switch. We suffered because of it. Our shooting was slow to align and inaccurate since the driver had to manually aim the turret (a potentiometer or encoder would be far better) and there was no closed-loop shooter speed control.

During the off-season, we competed in Vex Robotics Competition, using more sophisticated software techniques, such as velocity and position PID control, multi-threaded code, motor controller linearization and trapezoidal velocity profiles. Most of these features worked well, given the limitations of Vex sensors, and made the drivers' lives much easier.

This year, we applied the lessons learned from Vex to FRC. On our robot, we have encoders and a gyro for the drivetrain, a potentiometer and limit switches on the shooter mount, custom optical encoders on the shooter wheels, a limit switch for pyramid alignment, the pressure switch and a camera to help run the floor intake. These sensors helped make our hardware far more competitive. However, effectively using all these sensors requires extensive software skills (Thanks Ether, 254) that must be learned and practiced before build season. It is certainly worth pursuing these skills; they can only help you. That said, there are many highly competitive robots (1726, as mentioned above) running very simple software.

Also, more complex sensor-based software can be far more difficult to debug and fix at competition. We learned about this the hard way: Since we built a practice bot, our software was written and tuned for it. When we tested it on our competition robot, we had serious issues with shooter mount and drivetrain control. Thursday afternoon and most of Friday of the Arizona regional was spent debugging the code. That cost us our first five qualification matches (though we did then win the second five).

Please feel free to ignore all my ramblings. This was written late at night after finishing a rather annoying Literature essay.

255th post. Is my post counter about to roll over to 0?