Record and Play Motor Movements

Technical NI LabVIEW
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This year we are planning on making a robotic arm like the ones used in manufacturing to grab and move the power cubes.We are also planning on having set positions for the arm to move to (One for grabbing a cube, one for placing it in the switch and one for the scale)

We are wondering what your ideas where for how to do this, My current plan is to use encoders to track distance and maybe save the output of the motors somewhere so that the code can read it back later.

Any input would be appreciated as past years we have had trouble with precise encoder readings and have no experience saving and reading data for FRC.

Thank you

2

As a serious question, are you mad at yourselves?

I’m not sure of any way to record those motor movements. But, if you do decide this is the route you want to take (and can do so without extending beyond 16" from your frame perimeter), you’ll probably have more sustained success looking into working with encoders and PID than you will trying to play things back as if there aren’t any variables that can change the way you’d want things to play out.

3

This manipulator ticks all of my DO NOT PUT ON ROBOT boxes. It is mechanically, electrically, and programatically difficult.

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Add one more tick to “difficult for the driver to maneuver”

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I’m an alum and I agree it’s a terrible idea, But part of me also feels like it’d be a fun programming challenge. If we stick with this idea I’ll let you guys know how it turned out :wink:

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So first off if you decide that that is what you REALLY want to do, you’re going to need to save the data onto a text file on the roborio and read it back later. But if you are going to put an encoder on your arm anyway, I have no idea why you would want to record motor movements when you can just use the encoder data and a PID to do a position controller anyway. Since it seems like your idea is to have some sort of a smooth movement between arm locations, you’d be better off writing a motion profiling system for the arm to follow, i.e. write a function that creates a motion profile to follow when you give it a start and end point.

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1717 did something like this during Lunacy, which was i think 2009. Its mentioned in the book A New Cool. Follow what the other people were saying move to a set point dont try to record the movements. If you truly want to do it though, do it the easy way first then once you have some practice attempt the hard way. Maybe you can contact someone from 1717 to help you. I know they used java that year

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3310 struggled through it in 2015’s Recycle Rush as well.

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