I have a student that mounted a pot and it indexes every 90 degrees. I asked him what he did to get it to that and he said nothing?? It will be really handy for an autonomous switch but why is it doing this?
Intriguing. What do you mean by index? Are you talking about something done in software? Or does the pot seem to have a detente (like a tactile notch) every 90 degrees? Or is the pot’s shaft connected to something that provides a detente?
I know if you turn a pot too far and go out of its normal operational range, you can encounter its dead spot. Is it possible your student has turned the pot onto that dead spot and you are feeling it click a little as it rides over that zone??? I think that zone is about 60-90 degrees. Does the pot still give a reading between clicks, or from click to click?
yes, it actually has a dentente every 90 deg. so it has 2 detente clicks between the high and low. We have used sensor debug and it has 4 specific counts as a result and also a constant reading between clicks, and between hi and low we get the full 0-4072 counts.
That sounds very useful. Are these new pots? I wonder if Vex started sourcing their pots from somebody new.
I suspect what is happening is a happy circumstance 
They are using an axle through the pot and it is mounted on a square hole in the metal. I think the flat side on the axle is clicking on the flat spot on the hole in the metal and it happended that the starting point on the pot was aligned with a flat spot on the metal. So it has 4 detentes.
Absolutely not!
This is a brilliant design feature created by your students and is worthy of bragging about to the judges. Not only that, it deserves a video and detailed description in the notebook.
Hey, if it works, it is something everyone can use, and it sounds to me like a very clever, inexpensive way to give kids a way of selecting autonomous, etc. You definitely want your kids to document this!
Congratulations! :):)
Well thanks FullMetalMentor it’s all in how you sell it right I will have them detail this in their notebook. Many times engineers come up with inventions or design changes because of happy circumstances.
Your stealing my idea dangit I made like 900 lines of code just to get it to work and I got 1 paragraph in our book.