[keehun]

Your team is lucky that they have someone like you passionate and willing to write things from scratch. Many teams do not have the student body, talent pool, or time to be working on advanced programming like you mentioned. You're certainly welcome to reinvent many of them (for instance, vision algorithm probably isn't the most optimized and accurate there is). However, there's something that's not provided: how to tie in all the sensors, chug the math, and do slick autonomous. Sure, they tell you where the target is, they tell you how fast you're moving, they tell you the G's the robot's getting in 3 axis, but you really have to work and test to TIE in all that information, make sense out of it, and get the robot to respond to them.

For instance, our first year, we had to write our own quadrature encoder drivers (I have no clue WHY...) but that took our really awesome mentor and a genius student (MIT now) a LONG time to make. Even then it was really shaky. There were significant time synchronizing problems, noise in the data, etc. I'd say that you really shouldn't need to deal with that right now. I found that trying to just use encoder data in the grand scheme of things to be really hard last year with traction control.

Just food for thought.

Keehun