[TedP]

I've noticed a lot of robots building special inputs onto their robots connected to the digital ports on their RCs in order to configure their autonomous mode. They do this because they can't "see" the OI during autonomous mode and thus these configuration utilities can't be put on the OI.

However, if you're smart about it, there's no need to add additional hardware to your RC just to configure autonomous mode. Personally, I'd much rather have delicate electronics on my OI than my RC...

Remember that the OI *can* be heard while disabled. That is, all "disabling" the robot does is to disable the sattellite processors that actually do the work communicating with the relays and the speed controllers. However, as far as the robot is concerned, it's not disabled at all -- it's running fine. It even sees all the input changes on the robot. This is useful for debugging -- the robot can still respond to OI inputs and produce output on the program port even though it won't drive any outputs.

All robots start disabled and then move into autonomous mode. During this disabled time, simply sample the state from your OI and store that somewhere where it won't be touched. When it moves into autonomous mode, read from that the proper state of the autonomous mode. You've now configured your RC from the OI.

I ran this by the IFI guy at our regional, and he was skeptical. Then he saw our robot work during the next match while being configured from the OI and not the RC; this was apparently news to him.

We did the same thing last year with our Stamp-based RC. In both cases, as long as you pay attention during disabled mode, keep some memory, and only pay attention to the memory during autonomous mode, you can configure autonomous mode from the OI.

I'm sure some people are very familiar with that trick, but a lot of people I ask are still convinced that the RC is the only way.