Quote:
Originally Posted by AlmightyPiMan
sorry for my lack of knowledge, i'm a rookie, but i don't get why a team would want to set a button for autonomous mode at all. isn't it controlled via the competition port and thus out of our hands? in the docs for the OI it says that if you jumper pins 5 and 8, it puts the bot into auto mode. i imagine that's what they do at the competitions, not have a team member push a button on the controller...
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You're confusing two (related) issues:
1. You can build a dongle or jumper the competition ports to test your autonomous mode during development. At the competition, you are correct, the competition port handles this.
2. Many teams have multiple autonomous strategies, or at least variations on strategies (for example, left- and right-handed versions of the same strategy for starting on that particular side of the field). Our team usually has a whole suite of strategies (eight last year, although only three of them turned out to be useful, plus a fourth we developed at the competition based upon experience), and we pick them right before the match in consultation with the rest of our alliance. Sometimes we also call an audible and change the strategy right at the last possible second. Of course, you can't change the code at this point, so you need a way to change which autonomous mode you're running, either from the robot (switches and pots hooked to digital or analog inputs), or from the OI (using the OI ports). The latter is what people are talking about here, ways of setting the autonomous strategy while the bot is disabled and the field is being set up, but before the match (and autonomous mode itself) starts.
Real example: Last year, our primary strategy was to drive towards the goal, line up, and shoot copious amounts of balls into the target. We had three versions of that strategy, with different amounts of distance to drive depending on which position we started from.
We also found that the other alliance would usually dedicate at least one bot into crashing into us during autonomous to either block us or mess with our aim, usually by dead-reckoning across the field. So we had a variant of the primary strategy that waited several seconds in our starting box before driving towards the goal and scoring (we scored very, very quickly, so we could afford to wait five seconds). This (usually) allowed the other team's defensive bot to drive right by, and we'd then move up and score. The decision on whether to drive directly at the goal or do the delayed version was decided by the drive team based upon how the other alliance lined up their bots: if they were obviously aiming to intercept us, we'd change strategies.