[Ryan Cumings]

Something that won our team an award from last year was a "debug box". It doubled as our arm control mechanism, but it had a big red button on it that said debug. When you were in debug mode you could hit a combination of 4 keys (or more) to change the way the robot operated. The changes would then be stored in the flash (?) memory so next time the controller booted, it would use the saved changes. The idea was to preprogram as much as you can to not need to recompile the program to do mundane changes.

A list of features was
- Enabling and Disabling the Right or Left motors
- Inverting the polarity on the Right or Left motors (this was useful for motor replacement)
- Changing the operator drive mode from one stick, two stick, or ultra topic secret mode
- Selecting which autonomous program to run
- Motor dampening
- Enabling and disabling specific debug statements
- Having one test autonomous program that you could hot script and save

This year we were planning on getting an rj-45 jack and hooking it into the digital ins/outs and then having a project box with LCDs on it as well as a keypad. The project box would then be able to hot plug into the robot and the LCDs would make a menu of sorts to replicate the same function as described before. They could have also been used to display output variables and such.