Could I use this code to go into a linetracking program when a button is pressed, then leave the linetracking program when the same button is pressed? Or will it infinitely loop? If I can't, what can I do differently?



Thanks!

You are very close with the code that you have, and are definitely on the right track. The only issue I am seeing; what happens when you press the 8D button? The program will check to see if it's pressed in the 'if' statement, and if it is will immediately check the button status again to see if it is released (if it is, then it does the linetracking segment of the code). I'm not sure how fast your thumbs are, but I'm pretty sure the microcontroller will switch from the if statement to the while statement before you can pull your finger off the button

Alternatively, you can put the linetracking code in the while loop, change the while loop's condition to a true, and remove the if statement entirely:



The modified program above will start into an infinite loop. Inside the infinite loop, it will check for button 8D being pressed and if so will start the linetracking segment (and continue to run it as long as the button is held down). If button 8D is not pressed or is released, the program will skip the linetracking segment and go to the teleop part of the program. It will then go back to the beginning of the infinite loop and keep running indefinitely.



You can also use an If-Else statement to check if the button is pressed or not and have the program act accordingly. This is generally a preferred method (for ease of scalability in larger programs) but in this case will act the same way as the double while loops (the program just executes a little bit differently).

Yea, I was affraid it would do that, but I didn't have my robot available to try it.

Thanks for explaining!

At closer look, those programs would enter the linetracking when button 8D is pressed, but would not exit it when 8D is pressed (maybe I misunderstood)? How would I accomplish that task?

Having it toggle will be a bit trickier. Using the code behind the 'untilBump' Natural Language command, I was able to throw together this little doozy;



The first thing I did was declare an integer variable called 'delayTimeMS'. This variable is used to compensate for a property of switches called 'bouncing', which is when a switch (physically nearing the other 'prong' internally) rapidly bounces between an open and closed state. You can't see it normally (it happens very quickly) but when you push a switch its output is actually similar to this:

000000000000000000001010101010101111111111111111111111111111101010101010000000000000000000000000

Where 0's are the switch being open or 'not pressed' and 1's are the switch being closed or 'pressed'. We'll get back to how this used in the code soon.

The first while loop puts the robot in tele-op mode while the 8D button is not pressed. Once the Cortex sees the button first being pressed (or the first '1' value if using the example above), it kicks out of the while loop and enters a 50 ms 'debounce' state, which allows it to ignore the rapid 010101 switching. When the debounce period is over it waits for the button to be released, which kicks it out of the second while loop.

At this point you have physically pressed and released the switch. The robot now enters the third while loop (which contains the line tracking code) and stays inside of it until the button is pressed again. It follows the same 'debounce period -wait for release -debounce period' when the button is pressed, and then the whole program loops back up to the start of the infinite loop, starting the process over again.

If we didn't have the debounce wait command, the Cortex would rapidly switch between the tele-op and line-tracking segments of code because the amount of open and closed states (0's and 1's) is completely random when the switch is bouncing. The debounce period is switch dependant as well, so you may have to tweak that value to match your physical robots. Ideally, you would want it as low a value as possible without having any bouncing issues, but it's much better to be safe than sorry.

I highly suggest taking the time to go through our Cortex Video Trainer as it covers a great many of these topics. The knowledge you can gain from them is invaluable as a ROBOTC coder.

Wikipedia also has a great segment on switch bouncing you might want to check out.

Ah, ok. That was clever going to the untilBump function .

Thanks!