[marshall]

Originally Posted by AlexanderTheOK

Just mentioning this on the debate of incremental vs absolute because it hasn't been, and was what pushed 696 to use the ma3 instead of a quad encoder.

1 quad encoder takes 2 ports.

you will need 8. (one for steering and one for drive odometry right?)

Thats 16 digital ports. You don't have that to spare, especially if you want oooh i dont know, limit switches and a quadrature encoder on your elevator, or any other basic digital sensors.

You COULD run the sensors into an offboard processor, which would then stream the data over via UDP.

Or you could gear an MA3 1 to 1, save yourself 8 digital ports, save time during development by only needing 4 magic numbers in your robot code, save time during competition by not having to realign everything perfectly before each match, and save time during the build season by not having to code an offboard processor and the netcode necessary.

I know it's a compromise, but I feel like the positives far outweigh the negatives.

(Note: We at 696 DID NOT gear the MA3 1 to 1. It was a pain in the butt. We ended up essentially having quadrature encoders that go into an analog port. Not a mistake I would ever make again. It worked fantabulously during competition but something may have snapped in me halfway through debugging.)

The Talon SRX controllers can take quadrature input and then you don't have to waste any of the DIO ports for them. You don't have to do anything on them like PID control to get feedback from them about the encoders. Granted, the SRX controllers have their own issues with that silly ribbon cable...

We stored our offset values on a text file on a USB drive that was plugged into the RoboRIO. We could update them easily enough by just changing the alignment and then hitting a button on the dashboard.