Offloading intterupts to a counter

[Max Lobovsky]

The drive train should be just barely traction limited so slipping will be rare. There are many cases where the drive trains will backdrive in my application, often the motors will not be on and the wheels will spin, it is not always that they will be spinning in the opposite direction. I defenitley do need a direction sensor. Regardless, it isn't too hard at all to check direction with the quadrature encoders, every counter i have looked at has the capability to, and it probably doesnt add too much time to my interrupt code to do a single if on a digital i/o pin. One possible solution might be to use current sensors to see if the motors are being backdriven, but if im going to be counting encoder clicks, i might as well count them up and down.