Awesome advice. Thanks. The problems we had with our IMEs last year is they’d work perfectly at practice then fall flat on their faces at tournaments - so I had no way to replicate the failure modes at home. Unfortunately, the IMEs are going into the garbage heap of robotics history for us!
The annoying thing is that, physically speaking, they can get into places much smaller than Quads can, but it’s still no worth the effort. Speaking of, would it be illegal to remove some of the bottom plastic from an Quad to make it fit better?
I used sonars to line up and autonomous high lift last year:
its really slow because this was the first test. The only problem i have encountered was 1, i filled up too many ports on my cortex with sensor and it stopped reading them (but this was a known problem i found from another post after) and 2, when it pointed towards my 3D printer and computer it would start outputting false values. Other than that i like them.
My opinion comes down to “When in doubt, use a shaft encoder”.
They track gear rotation practically inflintly. This can be used to track arms, track drive trains, track a gear on an axle to select an autonomous mode (A potentiometer works better for this task though due to size).
Using this sensor along with a Gyro and Accelerometer allows you to fine tune to robot beautifully.
The only negative of the encoder is the size; it’s HUGE and requires two wires. Yet this is the only area it falters in when compared to its potentiometer counter-part.
Well a potentiometer is not a counter part as it has limited rotation. Potentiometer is way better than encoder for arms/lifts and claws or anything that has limited movement
Encoder should only be used for the drivetrain
