Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
Mike,
Calibration of both Jaguars and Victors is a step that many teams do not take. The assumption is that the controllers are shipped pre-calibrated from the factory. In reality the calibration procedure matches your joystick travel to the maximum output of the controller. This step can be accomplished in software or a simple procedure in the controller. Without this step, your robot may not meet full throttle at each extreme of the joystick (or whatever you use to drive) or more importantly, it may not be matched for both forward and backward motion. In extreme cases the motors may not be at zero throttle when the joystick is at rest.
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This is probably straying off-topic for this thread, but I don't think calibrating the speed controllers is wise in most situations.
Ever since autonomous started, joysticks haven't been the only thing controlling the robot. If you calibrate the speed controller to match a bad joystick, you will adversely affect the performance in autonomous mode.
Furthermore, the centering of the joysticks should not be an issue with the NI control system. Modern joysticks automatically calibrate the center position. Thus, you should not plug the joystick or enable the robot with joysticks off center. Any students should be familiar with this, as video game systems have had the same limitation since the N64.
If you really do want to use a particularly bad joystick, I think you're far better off compensating in software only during teleop.
If you have a speed controller with calibration that doesn't seem right, you should calibrate it with an autonomous routine that outputs -1, 0, and 1. Additionally, WPILib (in all languages) has it's own calibration values for min, max, center, and deadband, so you can adjust those for a particular speed controller. In java, it's the setBounds function.