Howdy!
Week 5 is now behind us, meaning there are less than 10 days left in Build Season! Time is running out! Robot construction has been going well over the last couple weeks. So for this week’s blog post, we decided to interview the programming team.
Q: What do you enjoy about programming?
A: It feels very rewarding when your code works. We really enjoy going through the logic.
Q: What are you changing in the code from last year?
A: A big part of this year is the new hardware that we have. We replaced our motor controllers with Talon SRX’s and Victor SPX’s. Motor controllers tell the motors how much power to output on a basic level. We now have 2-way communication with the robot, so we can tell a motor controller to drive a specific amount, and it will report back.
Q: Have you successfully driven the robot yet?
A: Yes, our teleop drive has been improved immensely from the Talon SRX motor controllers. Not only that, but we are also in the process of testing autonomous code. So far, the code has run very smoothly.
Q: What programming language do you use?
A: Our team uses LabVIEW. We don’t have much experience with other languages so we can’t really say whether it’s better or worse than other languages, but we enjoy the blocks on the interface, and the code definitely runs well.
Q: What is Motion Magic?
A: Motion Magic is a way of making the drive experience better. It takes the yaw from the gyroscope and filters it through a PIDF loop, which stands for Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Feed Forward. The PIDF loop keeps the robot going in a straight line. Yaw shows what angle your robot is facing; for example, facing straight is 0 yaw. If the robot is going 2 yaw and we want it to go 0 yaw, it will correct it with Motion Magic.
Bonus! Here is the list of currently submitted team avatars. Can you find us? (Source: https://www.thebluealliance.com/avatars/2018)
