[Oblarg]

Just thought I'd report back - we just got a flywheel working with a PF loop, basically exactly as described above. Indeed, there is plenty of headroom to make the P term big enough that the steady-state error is negligible (plus or minus ~.2 RPS) without the system becoming unstable. We'll see about tuning our drive this way next, though we need a few more talons to do that.

Just a note about PID control on the talons: god, the handling of the units in the java WPILib code is terrible. "Native units" (which are noted to be either per 10ms or per 100ms depending on which source you check; they are actually the latter) are used everywhere *except* for the set and getsetpoint functions, which use RPM. The comments helpfully mention that the latter function returns a value in "appropriate units." Also, the output scaling for F gain is -1023 to 1023, which is a sort of odd choice.

On the plus side, the loop works great.

I hope, before too long, to try tuning a variety of systems using both strategies and actually compare the performance.