Shooter subsystem

[jtechau]

Create a shooter subsystem. At a minimum the shooter subsystem will consist of a motor to run the shooter wheel. Likely the shooter will also include a feeder to feed balls into the shooter wheel.

The shooter wheel will be a Falcon motor (tentative), which will need to run at a regulated RPM. The RPM might be fixed or variable, so the subsystem should provide a method to set the shooter to a specified RPM. It may also provide a method to turn the shooter off. The Talon FX motor controller in the Falcon motor has the capability to regulate and report the motor speed.

[jtechau]

While the shooter design hasn't yet been determined, it will likely consist of a Falcon motor, so programming the subsystem can proceed, with small risk of the design causing major rework of the subsystem. At this point, I'd say we can implement:

• Subsytem

  • Falcon motor
  • methods:
  • setRPM(double rpm) - set the shooter speed. This will involve setting up and tuning the Falcon's PID controller, which may take some time.
  • stop() - stop the shooter
  • getRPM() - get the shooter RPM
  • In periodic(), send the shooter RPM to the dashboard. Ideally only send the data perhaps 5 times per second, to make it easier for a human to view. (Values changing at 50 Hz are difficult for a human to see.) Also, an integer value is sufficient - no need for all the decimal values.

• Dashboard

  • Create a (temporary?) dashboard to display shooter RPM. This, along with the getRPM() method, would be a good first step in working with the Falcon's encoder.

• Commands

  • Create a temporary command to set the shooter RPM to various values. Could be based on Xbox inputs, or just an "autonomous" command to set the shooter at various values for some number of seconds.

[jtechau]

See this gist for example code to implement a list of shooter rpm presets, including an alternate list to be used during development.