Team 1717 Open Source Gyro Software

Throughout high school, I was part of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy. Each year as a capstone project the senior class builds a robot and competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition representing the academy's team, Team 1717. The 2013 game, Ultimate Ascent, was a sort of mix of frisbee golf and ultimate frisbee.

My role on the team was programming. One of our big tasks was writing code to integrate the angular acceleration measurements of a gyroscope in order to track the robot's orientation. Knowing the orientation of the robot allowed us to make the robot's controls field oriented rather than robot oriented. This meant that when the driver pushed the joystick, the robot would always drive in the direction that the joystick had been pushed, regardless of its orientation (i.e. if you pushed the joystick away from you the robot would drive away whether it was facing toward you or away from you). Due to this feature and a lot of other hard work, we managed to take home the Innovation in Control award, an award celebrating innovative control systems and unique machine functions. Because of all the work that went into writing really good gyro code, we decided to release the code publicly: (both Arduino side and robot side): https://bitbucket.org/dpea/1717-release. The hardware we used can be found here. Feel free to check it out and comment bellow with questions.