hey vex people, what is your opinion on tethered controllers? our team is thinking about using them, we are open to any suggestions. what do you guys think?
sincerely,
Nathan Matlack
My team is using a tether controller this year. On one we have the base and mobile goal intake, and on the other we have the dr4b, chainbar, and the claw. We do this to speed up the scoring process, and make it so the drivers have less to do, making it harder to mess up.
Because some robots this year have many subsystems (our last bot had 5), I would not be entirely opposed to partner controllers, as I was last season. We used them to count cones on our last bot, but without lots of code, they would have been necessary to do other tasks for sure. It can be good for teams that aren’t ready to automate large parts of their robot, or don’t trust code to regulate tasks as much. (I say “tasks” colloquially.)
My teams have been using tethered controllers for quite a while. As the complexity of the task increases, the demands placed on a single driver can be very difficult. On the other hand, tethered controllers does require practice and good communication (which is not a bad skill to learn).