Making more reusable commands

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

If you're worried about writing commands to control individual cylinders, you're probably not at the appropriately high level of abstraction. I suggest that you should be controlling subsystems, not actuators. The subsystem implementation should take care of the details of motor and relay and solenoid control based on commands for speed and state.

Don't extend or retract a cylinder. Instead, engage or disengage a brake, or lock or unlock a latch, or open or close a gripper. It would be appropriate to extend or retract an arm, if that's the motion you've designed it to do.

This is the way it should be done. The parts (solenoids, motor controllers, encoders, etc.) should be contained to each of the different subsystems and how you control those different parts should be strictly limited to the methods you make available to the commands. Commands should never have direct access to any of the devices set up in a subsystem.