Potentiometer Placement

This is a silly question. I have a RD4B, and I was wondering where is the best place to place my pots: tower, 1st stage, 2nd stage

Where are you powering the lift from? Pictures would help too, it’ll depend on which axles are powered/attached to the gears.

I would place them as low as possible, if only to minimize the amount of wire needed and the number of joints that the wire needs to go around. However if you are not powering the lift from the bottom towers, then you may want to simply place it on the lowest powered joint.

I have placed them on the second stage and sometimes the lift could be completely tilted but the pots would still register that it was straight

The back side of the first stage seems to be the best place to register differences in tilting action in most cases.

For setting up auto leveling code I would suggest reading through some of these posts.
https://vexforum.com/showthread.php?p=372446

Especially the part about how IMEs can be used effectively for leveling while pots work best for registering absolute height.

The problem we discussed in the thread is that each pot is unique in the curve they create between the beginning and end of their useful ranges.