Quote:
Originally Posted by virtuald
The encoders are driven by the way that they're initialized underneath the hood, and it's a bit odd. Perhaps the HAL implementation will get updated this fall and it'll get better. Sorry about the lack of documentation. Feel free to improve it and submit a PR. 
You'll note of course that the place where the implementation tends to be strong is in stuff that we used, and as you mentioned I like to attach encoders to the CAN devices directly instead of using them standalone.  |
When you say they are driven, I'm curious what you mean by that. This is solely for testing/simulator use so we can verify the behavior of various controllers. I assume that since the code has no idea how the physical system is connected it can't automatically increment encoders. What I'm trying to write is the physics.py:update_sim(self, hal_data, tm_diff) function. Visibly, the robot is moving properly in the simulation but encoder values can't possibly update on their own. I'm trying to add that.
And don't worry, I'll take a whack at a PR (or one of my students will) once we have something to contribute back. And we haven't (yet) made the leap to CAN though I suspect that might be coming in the near future. But possibly one major change in the software is enough for the time being.