Ready for ACTION!

The robot is now at a functional state with lots of new automation and is ready to compete in an offseason competition.

It certainly took a lot of time, especially with the abundant testing, and fixing some confusing bugs.

Completed:

• Added manual aim adjustment
• Created and saved elastic dashboard

Challenges:

• There was a bug caused by autonomous path filtering that I helped my team fix. It was hard to find what was causing it and even now I still don’t know why that line was causing a problem.
• Fixed a bug where the automatic shooting was actually not shooting when everything is ready, but was shooting instantly.

Moving forward:

I’m gonna keep working on this and improving it for our next offseason competition instead of shipping it already. So the plans are:

• Automatically detect when we’re intaking, shooting, or a certain spot is facing resistance with stator current thresholds.
• Improve moving while shooting accuracy.
• Try some object detection, 3d simulation, and vision sim.

Signing off,
Ash-ioL

Entering the last week before offseason comp

Trying to make the robot as sophisticated and automated as possible on the controls side here before the offseason event. I’ve haven’t really been working on any other coding project other than this.

Changes/Improvements:

• Replaced the robot’s default position to x-lock instead of idle. X-lock is a wheel position for swerves that makes the robot hard to move.
• Changed the polar magnitude limiter to a acceleration limiter which lets us tune things more directly and easily.
• Developed a list of things the robot should do (like actions to bind to the controller) and implemented them in the code. Many are automated and simple to use, reducing operator error.
• Fixed some improper commands that were causing issues by not being interrupted properly.
• Predictive targetting: picks target based on where teh robot WILL be rather than where it is.
• Experimented with a jerk limit, hoping it’ll cause an s curve but it ended up causing some weird oscillations since it was reactive and not predictive.
• Logged the state for each subsystem.

To do:

• Improving our autonomous routines.
• Add a manual adjustment for targets.

Signing off,
Ash-ioL

Smoother Tracking, Quicker Maneuvers, Automated Sequences

It’s been a week or two since my last devlog. I’ve been working on this and helping getting it ready with my team for our next offseason competition, which is probably when I’ll do my first ship for my contributions to this project.

Features:

• Improved aiming while shooting by using the interpolated mean to average the robot’s velocity to make it less impacted by randomness.
• Smart controller detectoin to see how many controllers your using and binds the functions appropriately.
• More efficient bump crossing with the robot now snapping to the nearest 45 degrees rather than just a fixed one.
• Improved compatibility in my customjoystick for simulation.
• Reduced the logging overhead by removing unecessary stuff that’s only needed in simulation.
• Made it classify aiming as not idle so that it aims when standing still.

I also spent time adding logging for these features and making sure the code is neat and readable as possible, while double checking and testing in simulation a lot. I also fixed a couple small bugs here and there.

Tha challenges were mainly not that like confusing as it is sometimes. The big thing was like testing and navigating the code which took up the most time. But really this is all worth it because its so nice to see your code just come to life on a real robot.

Signing off,
Ash-ioL

Made some progress!

Completed:

• Trajectory generation to bumps using compact code
• Removed trig from polar slew rate and replaced with vector math (so much cleaner)
• Fixed some axis inversion with the contorller input causing weird behavior.
• Broke bump paths unintentionally but fixed it again
• Fixed some landmark positions and zone coordinates that were incorrect
• Increased kp in heading requests to make it snappier

I am pretty surprised at the amount of things that I was about to work on and get done in this 5 hour period of time. I did a lot of testing, involving digging through past commits for direction issues and narrowing down issues with the bump stuff, and I also made sure not to ignore the small details like cleaning up old code and keeping things readable and compact.

Next:

Honestly I might take a small break from this robot. I did have a cool idea of generating PathPlanner trajectories with continuous math functions. But I might do that in another repository and move it over to this after.

Signing off,
Ash-ioL

Progress on the time… but no progress on the code

First of all I want to be clear I spent every minute of these 4 hours working on this. I was learning in depth how commands work, and shortcuts to use them, etc. as I was coding this on the side.

Anyways now that we have that clear, back to the progress report.

So this entire time I was working on making a teleop auto generation functionality to go from bump to bump with the click of a button.

Phase 0: Programmers start at 0

This only took like 5 minutes. So I copied over a utility I made in another robot that remaps the Xbox controller readings from windows axis/buttons to macos axis/buttons. So yay! I can use my controller now.

Phase 1: Brute Force

I wrote a like a 120-200 line code (forgot), and it involved copy pasting and changing stuff each time, resulting in a unique seperate command for each zone the robot can be in.

Why this was changed: It hurt my eyes.

Phase 2: Compactifying:

So I managed to simplify those into one command that modifies the pose x y and rotation values directly and uses mirroring and stuff to really keep it as low lines and simple as possible. I was proud of this, took a lot of thinking and fixing minor tiny errors here and there.

Phase 3: Kicking out the teammate with 4000 ping

By teammate, I mean advantagescope. It turns out when I was a youngling learning to do frc code (still am ig), i accidentally installed the x64 version into my macbook instead of the arm64, so after installing the advantagescope that my cpu works better with, it fixed the 4000ping and 10fps and I got a beautiful thing actually moves more than 4 steps when I push the joystick.

Before this it took me a lot of time ot figure out that i needed to reinstall advantage scope. I tried to mess aorund with the command scheduler, have a debate with stubborn AI about how to fix this, and lets just say it took a lot of time.

Phase 4 - What… the… hail who sped up time while i was coding

So now as I am writing this I am looking at the clock expecting it to be 10am, and its currently 11:30am which is normal for some people but I do practice at 6:30am so I’m probably not gonna feel the best tomorrow but whatever. Oh and how did my code work?

THE COMMAND JUST MAKES THE ROBOT JUST STUPIDLY DRIVE STRAIGHT TO THE MIDDLE OF FUDGING NOWHERE

but yea thats a problem for tomorrow.

And sorry the repository is private for now. I’ll try to get it public when my team meeting happens.

Signing off,
Ash-ioL