Programming tricks (and former trade secrets)

[meatmanek]

Originally Posted by Cuog

I made the robot fight gravity actually it was a code w/ the accelerometer that would try and push back, but with no testing it made driving impossible because I got the direction that it corrects wrong, so it fights itself, oops

In the way of useful things I did this year, I got our omniwheel bot to drive mostly straight(still have to tune that) using a gyro chip that hopefully will self calibrate. The drive code also very nicely allows us to drive it FPS style with one joystick for translation and the x axis on the other for spin.

Last year, we used mecanum wheels to drive our robot. I played with some code using the YRG to make the joystick always be relative to the driver, rather than the robot. Push forward on the joystick, and it goes down the field, push right on the joystick, and it goes right on the field, twist the joystick and the robot will turn. Unfortunately, our drivetrain was too fast, capable of turning about one revolution per second (without the rest of the robot, I don't know what it was with all of that). The YRG was limited to 80 degrees per second. I wanted to get another gyro, but we never followed through on that.

If you're using a DAA to control an arm, you might consider using a quadrature encoder. DAAs are prone to drift, and aren't very accurate when you integrate them twice to get position.