Programming tricks (and former trade secrets)

[Alan Anderson]

Now that the robots are on their way to their respective drayage, I'd like to hear about some of the innovative, clever, or just plain cute programming features that teams came up with this year. Did you implement a particularly elegant control system? Did you manage to make the driver's job trivial this year? I understand if you want to keep things mysterious for a few weeks, but please consider adding to the thread once you've demonstrated your robot in competition.

Here are a few novel things the TechnoKats did this year.

• The programmers figured out how to be lazy and not have to physically reach into the robot and push the PROG button in order to load new software. With a single wire connected between a digital output and the external PROG pin, the robot can push its own button. We have it programmed to set the output low when the letter 'p' is received on the program serial port.
• Since the team managed to build a second robot with a fully-functioning appendage, we needed to keep track of two separate sets of PID control constants. That was enough of a push to get us to adapt Kevin Watson's EEPROM-based configuration code for our use. With a special "tuning box" plugged in to one of the OI ports, we can adjust the constants on the fly, and then save them to EEPROM. No more recompiling just to accomodate a slightly lighter or heavier bit of hardware!
• Since we already had the necessary EEPROM framework in place, we also gave the operators "presets" that they can store and recall at will.

Anyone else feel like sharing?