In RobotC in the Sensors setup window, once you tell it you’ve got one of these wires plugged in, it prompts you to tell it where the second one will go. Setup/InstallationĪs shown above in the product image, there are 2 wires leading out of each shaft encoder that get plugged into neighboring digital ports on the cortex. The chassis is not the only place to use these sensors, but it is the most popular. These sensors come in a handy 2-pack because you often use one on each side of your robot’s chassis to help you keep the robot driving straight in autonomous mode, in addition to knowing how far you’ve gone.
On a chassis they are typically installed in between the wheel’s supporting c-channels (the structure of one side of the chassis is something like: c-channel, wheel, encoder, c-channel, with spacers & shaft collars thrown in as needed). As you can see from the product image above, these items take up space (they’re more than 3/4″ thick). On this VEXU robot from New Zealand you can see the potentiometer in use on the arm, and the shaft encoder by the back wheel.Īs with potentiometers, using these encoders requires advance planning. To the novice team, these may seem bulky and less sophisticated, and one might think that a measuring device connected to the back of the motor itself (an IME) would be better, but one would be wrong… Plan for It in Your Design Do you know what all of the top teams had on their chassis? Big red shaft encoder boxes, and not one single integrated motor encoder. In the middle of last season, while we were struggling with IME bizarre behavior, we took a look around when we were at competitions. I recommend not using them if you have the option to use these instead. My earlier post lists the large, large number of ways that IMEs can screw up your robot. My team has shifted our building to use this type of encoder instead of the Integrated Motor Encoder (IME). The optical shaft encoder, also called a quadrature encoder, is a very popular sensor-sturdy and reliable. Shaft encoders are one of VEX’s most widely-used sensors.
STARSTRUCK DEFINE SERIES
This post is part of my series examining VEX sensors, one at a time, to review how each works and what they’re used for in competitive robotics.
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