alan412
commented
3 weeks ago Thank you very much for your kind words. There is an update coming showing how to do simple odometry using the GoBilda odometry pods along with a mecanum chassis. It will likely not be out before August.
Date on version you are commenting on
Jan 2 2024
Section you are commenting on
NA
Comments
Dear Mr. Smith, firstly I want to thank you for writing this book. I have been coaching FTC for 4 seasons now, and wish I would have worked through it sooner myself. We have several programming boards built now and we send them home with new and old team members every summer to work through your book!!
I am a civil engineer so I am very much out of my element mentoring robotics. Your book is extremely valuable to me and my students.
I recently finished working through each chapter with a few of our students and have learned a staggering amount. I found chapter 14 to be the most useful. It greatly improved my understanding of inheritance. I also appreciated chapter 16. I'll admit, I'm still a little confused about ISA HASA and how and when to use abstract classes, but I'll work through that chapter again to see if I can understand it better and when and where we should apply it for our robots.
If you're looking for ideas for additional content in future editions, I would sure appreciate learning how to record and download data and then import it into excel. Or Perhaps excel isn't the best way to analyze and plot data? It would be very useful to plot sensor data or other program variables. In particular we're trying to better understand "Odometery" and would like to plot our localization and some variables for our "pure pursuit" path following algorithm.
I'm sure it's probably outside the scope you intended for the book, but I think if you could tackle the topic of Odometery and help teams get started programming their own localization and path following classes it would be incredibly useful. It would help make more teams competitive with some of the powerhouse teams. It seems that teams with mentors that can more readily teach programming and especially localization and path following have a huge advantage over teams like ours who are stuck with mentors like me that do not have much if any programming skills. Your book has absolutely helped my kids close the gap, but truly understanding reliable Odometery remains elusive. I would prefer they program their own classes instead of using "black box" libraries. Most you tube videos and other tutorials are not comprehensive enough to enable my kids to program their own classes. We tried using the "Controls Eng. in FRC book by Tyler Veness but had trouble getting the theory into Java classes.
Anyway, I thought I might throw the idea out there in the hopes you might consider it.
Again Thank you so much for writing your book! Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss further. Otherwise, thanks for taking the time to read my message.
Chris Gemperline FTC 17969 MECH Gemp22@hotmail.com
Ps sorry if this isn't the appropriate place for a comment like this...