[FTC] New video series for FTC sensor help

[madz]

Hi everyone,

We're started a new video series to teach teams how to use off-the-shelf sensors from a variety of sources on their robot. During our two years in FTC, we've noticed that many teams struggle with programming using sensors both for autonomous and for driver assistance during TeleOp. Our hope is that teams can learn something from these videos that will be useful to them in their upcoming season.

The sensors we are covering are some that are already used in FRC but that we have not seen used in FTC much or at all.

Episode 1: The "Leftoverbot Control System" describes how we used our leftovers from the old control system (pre-ResQ) to make robots for outreach events at no cost to us.

Episode 2: We program a Sharp Analog Distance Sensor (< $10)

Episode 3: We wire and program a generic potentiometer (< $1)

With more episodes on the way and source code posted on GitHub (as we figure that out).

We'd love it if teams could check out our YouTube Channel and subscribe if you like what you see. We'd also love to hear any comments or feedback you have to help us make our future videos even better!

You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/c/FTCTeam4962TheRockettes

[madz]

Episode 4 on how to program a holonomic drive in Android Studio is up.

https://youtu.be/n2Q3PYVx0Qk

Next time, we'll look at how to wire a hall effect sensor using the digital inputs.

[Coach Seb]

Looks great Ladies!

We are a second season team and rookie using Java. I will use your video to program our first sensor.

Coach Seb

[ehochstein]

So happy for this resource to be out there - I will be referring teams to this when I receive questions!

[madz]

We added a new episode about using a Hall Effect Sensor as a limit switch.

https://youtu.be/OCA05t_Ac3Q

Thanks for the feedback so far! We're having fun making the videos, and hope they can help some teams out!

[madz]

We updated the code base to SDK 2.35, and we also added a video in the last couple of weeks about our ResQ robot:

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/FTCTeam4962TheRockettes

Source code: https://github.com/MSMHS-Robotics/FTC4962_Examples

Web site: http://teamrocketrobotics.com/?page_id=66

Episodes so far are:

• The LeftoverBot Control system
• Sharp Distance Sensor
• Potentiometers
• Programming a Holonomic Drive Train
• Hall Effect Sensor
• Tour of our 2015-16 ResQ Robot

If you have any questions or just want to drop us a note, please do!
Twitter: @ftc4962
Email: ftc4962@gmail.com

[madz]

We added a new episode about how to wire a $2 beam break sensor for use with the Modern Robotics DIM. You can use these to detect the presence of an item in a particular location (like a ball in your loader or shooter). The one we wired and tested seems to work pretty well.

It uses the same code as the other generic digital switches.

It does require two digital ports on the DIM. The first one needs three pins for the receiver (voltage, signal, ground) and the second one needs two pins for the transmitter (voltage, ground).

We didn't have to do anything special to get it to transmit on the second digital port. the pin seemed to be turned on already. If yours doesn't work automatically, you might need to turn on the pin, but I'm not 100% sure.

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/FTCTeam4962TheRockettes

Source code: https://github.com/MSMHS-Robotics/FTC4962_Examples

Web site: http://teamrocketrobotics.com/?page_id=66