After a fair bit of googling and searching the forums, I have been unable to find out how to set up/use the Tetrix Motor encoders. Can anyone provide basic setup/test code?

Thanks,
--Nathan

P.S. Sorry if this is a redundant post.

Okay, so I'm assuming all the mechanical stuff is done and the encoders are mounted properly to the motor with the included cable going from the encoder to the Hitechnic motor controller.

Don't forget to double check that you have the encoders plugged into the right port for the motor they are attached to.

After that using the encoders is pretty much automatic (which is partly the reason for lack of discussion about them)

Say you've got a motor named LeftDrive and RightDrive (assigned up in the #pragma section)

you can access the motor encoder value using nMotorEncoder[LeftDrive] and nMotorEncoder[RightDrive].
you can assign a value to them also which is usefull for resetting to zero.

nMotorEncoder[LeftDrive] = nMotorEncoder[RightDrive] = 0;

You can test they are working using the NXT Devices debug window. That's about it for encoders unless you have a more specific question.
Good Luck.

how do you set the DC motors to be used as a servo? I know it uses the motor encoder to read the position but I don't know what the code actually is.

sorry, I wish there was an easy answer to that one, but unfortunately thats a tough one.

If the PID control works then you should be able to:
1. Turn PID control on for the motor in question

2. Set the target position for the encoder

3. Start the motor by setting a speed value.


So try this out. But bewarned, I feel the PID control for the 12V motors is somewhere between useless and broken.
I tried for weeks to get this to work and was never happy with it. It sometimes goes completely screwy. Be careful and test it out thoroughly before you rely on it. Also try at various battery levels.

And try not to set power levels > 75%.

If this doesn't work then you have to write the PID controller yourself or use some other control technique. Because the built in PID controller parameters can't be tuned.

Another suggestion...before you try to use the PID controller. Run the sample program "NXT Motor Consistency vs Time" its under Sample Programs/Motor directory. This will help you know that everything is working okay before pulling your hair out with the flaky PID stuff.

Thanks for the responses! It turned out that our problem was accidentally reading nMotorEndcoderTarget[leftMotor] rather than nMotorEncoder[leftMotor] . I hate typo programming errors.