Hey, I am attempting to use the smartMotorLibrary mainly for the ramp up slew rate function and I’m running into the problem that when you clear the encoders to drive for a distance, one side of our motors ramps up faster than the other side. Our motors are on turbo gears as well… Also can anyone explain the slew rate function in simpler terms. I know that the default slew rate is 10… so what would increasing it do? And decreasing it?
I haven’t used smartMotorLibrary personally so I can’t help you with the specifics of it, but I can explain what a slew rate does.
A slew rate is the maximum rate you want something (in this case, a motor’s power) to change at. For example, on our drivetrain, we use a slew rate so we don’t damage our drivetrain gears when we change directions suddenly. Our slew rate is 15 - so for us, this means that in a given cycle of our slew rate task, the motor powers on our drivetrain can only increase or decrease by 15 in one 15 ms cycle.
So if you increase the slew rate, you can accelerate the motor faster, and if you decrease it, you limit how fast the motor can accelerate. You’ll want to find a value that keeps you from making your internal motor gears click (or your robot ride up on one set of wheels) but that doesn’t inhibit driver control performance by making the robot “drift” (you don’t want the robot to keep driving for a long time after you release the joysticks, or else there will be too much lag in the controls).
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s also a manual for using the smartMotorLibrary.
Let me know if you have any other questions, and I’ll be glad to help.