Better gyroscope?

[snekiam]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

I went into last year a skeptic and I came out a believer: the NavMXP is going on every FIRST robot from now on until something better comes along (and I suppose that will be a long time, if ever because honestly, 1-2 degrees during a match is pretty much as good as you'll need for almost any algorithm I'm likely to use).

It just works. Very impressive performance.

Dr. Joe J.

I was also a skeptic of a $99 gyroscope, especially seeing as most of its features are useless to us (ie field oriented drive). Apologies to anyone standing near the field when our auton was misbehaving last year, it shouldn't happen anymore with the navx.

[Joe Johnson]

Originally Posted by snekiam

I was also a skeptic of a $99 gyroscope, especially seeing as most of its features are useless to us (ie field oriented drive). Apologies to anyone standing near the field when our auton was misbehaving last year, it shouldn't happen anymore with the navx.

The Nav6/NavX-MXP takes literal rocket science technology and makes it available for mere mortals. The underlying tech (i.e. the Invensense MPU-9250) would have been a State Secret for most of my life (I'm not kidding).

It is a great chip but it isn't the most user friendly. $99 for a FIRST friendly wrapper is a bargain (imho), especially because some of that $99 was probably going to be spent on an MXP IO expansion board for your RoboRIO anyway.

Dr. Joe J.

[acastagna]

We had a lot of inconsistent behavior (unacceptably high drift, sudden rapid changes in angle) from the one you show in the picture, and went to the ITG-3200 gyro/accel available on Andymark this year.

Programming a custom interface took some effort, but so far we have had great results. Drift is less than 1 degree during a match and we can get a reliable calibration much faster. We have it integrating the rotation rate in a separate thread, and then we query it once per driverstation cycle to get the angle.