Team 254 Presents: 2015 FRC Code

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by thatprogrammer

Some questions (not a very advanced programmer, yet)
1. How do you run autonomous mode despite the looper? If you tried your approach on a normal iterative robot template, the loop would run on the wait commands, preventing it from advancing.
2. You need to generate splines to create paths for motion profiling, right?
3. What is the peacock motor?
Some more questions, but I'll wait for answers to to these first.

1. We run the auto in a separate thread. The main thread of the robot which handles iterative updates does nothing in auto mode because all of the marshaling done by the auto modes is done in another thread, and all of the control loops run in a different thread.

2. We didn't use any spline paths this year. All of the control loops were 1d (elevator carriages, drive forward, turn in place). All of the moving subsystems shared a generic base controller which could be tuned for the properties of that system. The motion profiling was done on the fly (this is a much easier calc than generating spline-y paths).

3. The original concept for our can grabber was a system that had 4 individual telescoping arms (feathers) that would go out and grab each can in auto, all starting from the robot centered on the field. This made the robot look like a peacock, and the name for that subsystem stuck through iterations. A motor peacock is just the motorized can grabber assembly.