[OCCRA]: OCCRA OCT-NE 10/14/09 Basic VEX Workshop PDF

[apalrd]

Why not have the VEXnet field controller do its job and switch into autonomous as opposed to having another useless button on a robot (also hogging bumper/limit switches, which we need) . And is this really necessary with such small robots with such low power motors? I can see a stop button on a big robot, where spontaneously entering autonomous can cause the robot to drive really fast and cause a large amount of damage, but for this, seriously? And a start button? Even for home testing, you can map one of the DIO pins to enable autonomous (autonomous_mode = rc_dig_in16;), or buy that thing that enables robots and switches them into autonomous at the transmitter end (by replicating the field controller, equivalent to a competition dongle on the FRC system). It seems to me that this whole start switch is serious overkill. Why semi-auton instead of plain autonomous?

Clarification on the MPLAB sequential analog thing:
MPLAB requires us to call the function "Set_Number_Of_Analog_Channels(SIX_ANALOG);" in user_initialization() of user_routines.c where we replace "SIX_ANALOG" with the number of analog channels we need, just like the FRC controller. The function starts from 1 and sets the sequential IO ports to analog. No changing that, unless we go into the library. We need 3 line sensors (1 follow, 2 line trigger), a pot on the (*classified device*) and a pot for the auton selection. Plus one just to be safe. That makes 6. If we aren't safe, that still makes 5 and is still too many for the start and stop switches. (Not like the field controller will switch us into autonomous or anything)