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Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0
Very true. In at least the past couple years, you've been able to have all sorts of sensors and such that could be connected to separate processors, so you could work on designing a custom "black box" in the off season. Include a few gyros, accelerometers, encoders even some ultrasonic proximity sensors, and it could give you a very good idea of where you were on the field.
Then, in the season, there's almost no work except physically rebuilding it. You could have it just send back the position and rotation of the robot to the robot controller.
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I was thinking even more of reusable software for the robot controller. With the controller now C programmable, the software is very portable even if the processor in the controller changes. A number of "problems" in robot control appear in all robots, for instance, providing the transfer function from joysticks to drive motor outputs. How many robots have you seen slamming around the field because the team used the default algorithm of joystick in equals PWM out? The output of the Victor speed controllers is VERY nonlinear relative to the PWM number input. You can come up with a general solution that's data driven and then you only have to tweak the data to fit the next robot. The software is already written and debugged. From developing the software in the first time around, you probably even have an idea how to tweat the data to make it do what you want in the new robot.
