PID controllers!

I just realized that some of the work we have been doing in 6.01 with state machines is getting pretty close to forming parts of a PID controller. I have been curious about those things, and have a grasp of how they work, but have yet to actually implement one to solidify said grasp. I suspect it might be coming up soon, since it is a very common control scheme.

This would be pretty neat for experimentation, as the only autonomous bots I’ve built to date have used proportional control only with an enormous deadband to avoid oscillation, or some sort of 3/8ths-ass fuzzy logic (not even half-ass).

Bets on when I’ll send one of the lab robots through the wall?

What the hell, people?

Equals Zero has been hit with a barrage of spam over the past week or so. It suddenly went from nothing to about 20 per day, fortunately all caught in the spamtrap.

Yeah, I know, still no Motorama event report… Consider it a vector sum of no motivation, busy classwork, and other projects. It’ll be up soon, I promise.

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM SPAAAAAAAM SPAM SPAM SPAM...

Let’s see how many spam messages this one gets.