As someone on the programming team, I’m always looking for ideas on making the robot better by doing something cool with programming even if it’s not super beneficial during the match. What have your programmers done to make the robot better or more awesome?
I decided to add sounds to the driver station laptop whenever something happens. For instance, when the robot enables, it says “activated” in a turret voice from portal and when a vision target is picked up, it says “target acquired.” I’m not sure how beneficial these sounds will be or if they’ll end up getting annoying. We might eventually add LEDs to signal to the loading stations like some teams did last year.
Last year we made a panel with a bunch of buttons to use instead of a joystick for our secondary. It was super useful because we had alot of buttons that we could organize to make sense and not be wierdly slapped around a preset joystick.
Every year we had a camera I always try to slip in a code that will capture and save the last seen picture, just before communication is lost between the robot and driver station. All pictures are then saved in a dedicated folder. It’s always nice to look back at those pictures and see the entire season through the robot’s eyes.
I’m curious about that custom swerve path follower. Is that for your autonomous? Is that something that your team might change right before the match to adjust for alliance partner’s sandstorm strategies?
So the path follower is something that we created to follow custom Swerve Pathfinder Trajectories that also supports rotational movement. Although to your point, we aim to be adaptable with our alliance partners.
We are currently fleshing out our robot’s main code functions, and now adding more operator friendly things like Shuffleboard and smooth driving equations. Using rumble and detecting gamepieces sounds cool, along with a dance function.
I also really like @Omer_Huly’s idea of saving pictures, and am wondering how one would do that?
It is actually quite simple to implement using the labview dashboard. I might be able to get a code snippet, If you like, once I’m back in the shop
(not sure about other programming languages, but I assume you can use similar functions to check whether you have a video stream from the robot’s camera and save the last image to the filesystem once you lose it).
How do we add the rumble feature for the xBox in Java? Do we have to do anything to map it like we do buttons, or do we simply use the setRumble(1); to activate it?
Assuming the XBox controller shows up correctly in the Driver Station (If it has bars to represents left and right rumble), yes you can do that. You just have to make sure to set the rumble back to 0 when you want it to stop, or it’ll go on forever.
Our controller does show 2 bars for rumble. Does the setRumble() activate both of them? Also, we are using 2 controllers, so I assume we would need to do control.setRumble(1); to distinguish which controller we want rumbling.
