Last Minute Code Changes

By Cooper

Task: Debug some last-minute code to be ready for our first qualifier of the season

This article may seem a bit rushed, but that's because it is - for good reason. Tonight is the night before the qualifier and it’s roughly 2 in the morning. Tonight we got a lot done, but a lot didn’t get done. We can explain.

We finally have a robot in a build state that we could use to test the code for the turntable properly. The only tragedy - it wasn’t refined, per say. But it’s good enough for tonight. There are some random discrepancies between the controller and the actual turning portions of the turntable, but they seem to be largely minute.

Next, we had issues just a bit earlier tonight with the elbow. First off, the elbow was backwards. The elbow would count the ticks backwards, such that down was a positive tick direction. Looking through all the code, we saw that the motors’ encoder value was flipped through a direct call to the DCMotor class. So we turned that one off and tried it but that didn’t work, so we then found another and put back the first in a different position in the code, thinking they’d cancel out. But, eventually, the solution was as simple as taking out the encoder values, which allowed the elbow to count the ticks forward. We plan to fine-tune our solution after the qualifier, but for now, it will allow the elbow to work.

Next steps

Get some sleep and then refine and complete the code tomorrow morning at the qualifier, and hopefully write some auto