Programming tricks (and former trade secrets)

[Adamskiy]

We did similar to the above quote of meatmanek, but scaled it from -100 to +100....lost some resolution, but it made calculations much more simple. And although we had a tank drive, we set the left thumbstick on our Xbox controller to the throttle, and the right thumbstick controlled steering. We did that after picking drivers, as one of them loves Halo and figured it would be more easy for him to control.

For our elevator, the motor that acted as the winch was a small CIM with a BaneBots gearhead/encoder on it, so we used the encoder to have set rack positions (high/med/low) that would be assigned to a single button on the Guitar Hero controller. We then had a limit switch at the bottom (load position) that would reset the encoder count to 0 to account for slight variations that would occur....obviously not the best method, but it was accurate to about an inch, so good enough since we lower the tube onto the rack to score.