Gyro Warning

[Ryan O]

This is just a warning to teams who have experienced the same problems we have been having with this year's gyro:

To start out, we read to manual, ect and wired up the left pins (The side with the white cable connected to the pin labeled "R" where the other were ground or 5 volts) and plugged it into analog port 1 on our RC. We proceeded to code up a simple test and print program using WPILib.

What we got for output was one of two things:

Consistent zeros

OR

A constantly increasing value

These are not the results we expected. All information indicated that the values should increase when the gyro was rotated right, decrease when rotated left, and stay the same when the gyro wasn't being moved.

So I went to the WPILib forums and described the problem. Being new to analog sensors in general and WPILib in specific this year, I firgured I messed up the code somehow. I went back and forth with Brad Miller, who was very helpful and even ran the code I posted for him on a VEX to check it, and everything seemed in order to him, except the fact that it would behave for me.

So I left it for awhile and helped with other stuff on the robot, tinkering once and awhile.

So today, I was working on it, and asked another team member to take another look at the electrical part. i had already checked it with a multimeter, and didn't have much hope for that option. I went and did something he needed me for, and he took a look at it.

I get back and he says "You know, there are more paths to this other set of pins than the one we're hooked up to. I've seen boards mislabeled before."

So, hoping he was right, I plugged a cable into the other set of pins. then I rant he same program I had been running. Low and behold, it worked. It started behaving like it should.

So, basically, what I'm saying is that this year's gyro, which IS a different model than last year's, is either labeled using different conventions (T no longer stands for temp but twist or something) or some of the boards were just plain mislabeled. If you are having the same problems we did, give it a try, the worst you can do is output a weird number to the terminal.