Started work on a "joy-to-voltage" post

_drafts/2020-08-03-Joystick-to-Voltage.md

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+---
+layout: page
+title:  "Notes from FRC: Converting joystick data to tank-drive outputs"
+description: "..and making a tank-based robot's movements look natural"
+date:   2020-08-03 09:07:00 
+categories: frc
+redirect_from: 
+ - /post/6j49kjl4/
+ - /6j49kjl4/
+---
+
+I am starting a new little series here called "Notes from FRC". The idea is that I am going to write about what I have learned over the past three years of working (almost daily) with robots, and hopefully someone in the future will find them useful.
+
+Today's topic is quite simple, yet almost nobody has written anything about it. One of the very first problems presented to you when working with an FRC robot is: *"I have a robot, and I have a controller.. How do I make this thing move?"*. When I first started as a software developer at *Raider Robotics*, I decided to do some Googling, as I was sure someone would have at least written about this from the video-game industry.. Nope.
+
+Let's lay out the problem. We have an application that needs to run some motors from a joystick input. Periodically, we are fed a vector of joystick data, `[T, R]`, where `[-1, -1] <= [T, R] <= [1, 1]`. `T` denotes our *throttle* input, and `R` denotes something we at Raider Robotics call *"rotation"*. As you will see later on, rotation is not quite the correct word, but none of us can come up with anything better. Some teams, who use a steering wheel as input instead of a joystick, call this number *wheel*, which makes sense in their context.