Programming tricks (and former trade secrets)

[JimGRobot]

Great thread, there are many good ideas out there.

We talked about the remote PROG button ourselves, but never implemented it.

One thing we did for the drivers was create an "Auto Trim" button for the joysticks. You use the regular trim adjust to get them close, then push the button. This saves the current joystick positions and subtracts those values from all future readings. This is built into a joystick "class" that is part of a code library that will be released to the world this spring.

We have an automatic scoring button, as others have mentioned, and separate buttons for all of the arm preset positions. We used a potentiometer for arm position feedback, and it works well.

One other cool thing is a micro-switch on the tube gripper to automatically close the jaws with a tube is present. This makes tube pickup very quick and easy.

We wired a bunch of momentary switches across a string of resistors connected to a single joystick input on the OI, instead of using 10 digital input bits. I will be making some PC boards over summer so others can do this very easily. The code does a little math to convert the input value into a switch number; this is built into another library class.

I guess that's all for now...
Jim