Making Debugging Easier

[Alan Anderson]

Our software read one of the otherwise unused joystick wheel inputs (yes, we used the old reliable black joysticks for the driver this year) and used its value to select among a set of User_Byte outputs to be viewed by a dashboard program. With the wheel at one end of its travel, it sent (the low 16 bits of) the three encoder wheel values. At the other end, it sent arm potentiometer feedback. Intermediate positions gave internal state information for the arm and drivebase control routines.

A separate "debug mode" switch selected between all of that and the regular "drive mode" dashboard data, which was basically monitoring the autonomous mode selection, the vision tetra detection, and a few feedback bits such as air compressor status.