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i'm happy with this new version, but it's still the hardware which limits us. until we can do simple math, out to at least two or three decimal places, it makes some things so much more complicated.
for instance, this year, to try and make the drills spin the same speed (since they go faster forwards), we had to come up with some formula. we had me, dan, a computer scientist, and a girl who's really good at math. in the end, we had a formula, but it was constantly off by about 20 units. solution? i added a constant. we tried to find out why we needed the constant, but we couldn't figure out how it fit in. we just accepted it, and moved on, cause we had no time to spare.
if we're going to have more and more autonomous segments, we're going to need much more control, much more speed, and much more memory space (ok, the scratchpad is good, but it can get very confusing if you use it a lot). there are plenty of solutions out there (everything from a Javalin chip to embedded linux), i just wish we had some way to make use of them in FIRST.
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