Programming

For our programming this year, we decided to use Java in Android Studios. This way it would be more efficient and easier to manage code. Though it was hard at first, after tons of learning and error after error we finally had a complete understanding of the software. We had watched many YouTube videos from previous teams and took reference from the book, “Learn Java for FTC” by Alan G. Smith.  Our team decided to use GitHub to back all of our code up so we would have no chance of losing it. For our TeleOp, we programmed the controller to be how we want it as shown in the picture below. We currently have 4 autonomous codes to be played as per our alliance. We made use of the PID Controllers (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) to make the turns much more smoother and efficient. PID does this by continuously measuring and correcting errors between its current state and desired target. This feedback loop uses sensor data to adjust motor power for efficient movement. At the moment, we are experimenting with Limelight Vision Detection to detect April tags and color-specific samples to pick up from the submersible in our autonomous programs.

Some challenges that we faced were that at first, everyone was coding on their own devices and working on their own thing. The problem with this was that at one point, we had 4 Versions of the exact same code. To solve this, we came up with a naming system so that there would always be only one official code at any given time. In our second qualifier, our autons hardly worked as it was dependent on the positioning of the robot. To solve this, we made use of the PID Controller as mentioned above.