More Functional Code! 1/31/07

Hey

So we can make the robot (which is currently on blocks) move! Or rather, the wheels start spinning like they are supposed to be spinning. We hooked up the transmissions to the speed controllers and they didn't die. It's pretty cool. The deadband works too, after some problems yesterday because we were squaring the values to make parabolas. This made negative values turn positive and it wasn't very good. But now we are cubing it! =) And values stay the right sign. At first, because transmissions were facing different directions, right and left went different directions. Jessa showed us simple way (254 - ?) to fix that and it was very pretty. We looked through the code FIRST gave us, but actually really truly understood it this time. We also talked about sensors and what we need... It sounds like the arm needs two sensors to make sure it doesn't hit things, keep going and die. So we are writing "if switch is closed, die" code. In order to check voltage/etc on the touch switch, we used the oscilloscope and saw the pretty curves and that the voltage was 5V. We drew diagrams and the woooonderful if/then statements on the board with Judy and started to code for the arm/chassis switch.

To be continued...