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Unread 24-02-2006, 11:32
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Alan Anderson Alan Anderson is offline
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FRC #0045 (TechnoKats)
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Re: accelerometer specs

Quote:
Originally Posted by KenWittlief
Scaling the numbers in your SW to actual units (g's, volts, degrees...) is only necessary if a human needs to look at those numbers.
And even if someone does need to look at the numbers, the scaling can be done as part of the input and/or display of the values. The robot can still do all the real work using a convenient internal representation for everything else.

For example, last year we used nifty "follower" wheels to track our robot's position and heading during autonomous mode. The direction values were a minimally-processed version of the raw encoder counts, which got dubbed "RALPHS" for Robot alpha (angle). There was a straightforward conversion between RALPHS and degrees (or radians), but it was only used when specifying turns in the autonomous scripting.

There was a corresponding "RITA" unit for distance, intended to rhyme (sort of) with "meter", but measures of linear travel usually ended up just being called encoder counts.