Lesson 3: Driver Configurations

Welcome back to the VEX Classroom. In this video, you are going to be learning all about how to customize the controls on your controller to use different Driver Configurations. In the previous lesson, we talked about how to access the drive program on your VEX IQ second generation brain, and you practiced driving around a cube using that default drive, which I briefly mentioned is called Tank Drive.

Now, there are three additional options that we're going to go through. I'll show you how to change that on the VEX IQ second generation brain, as well as go through and test these together in a driver configurations activity. So, let's go ahead and get started.

As we did in the previous video, the first thing that we need to do is turn on our brain and turn on our controller so we can make them on and connected. What's really great is that the brain and the controller will remember that they have been paired before. You can see that mine automatically paired when they were turned on. It's really important to make sure that your controller and robot stay together by putting them back in the same kit. You could add labels on the back if you wanted to, but that way you don't have to go through the pairing process every time.

Now, to navigate through the brain screen, just like I did previously in other lessons, I'm going to show you a little bit clearer view of the brain screen and tell you how I am navigating through. Just like before, we need to go into our drive program in order to access these controls. I'm going to select the check mark to open drive. Now, rather than doing the run option, I'm actually going to go to the right, one, two, three times to our Controls option. I'm going to select the Controls, open those controls using the check mark.

The very first thing I see is the controls for my joysticks. There are a few things to notice in this image. First, you have the numbers one and six highlighted green. I can see here that my motors are plugged into ports one and six. That's what that green is telling me. Beneath that, we have our two joysticks for our controller, the left and the right.

Let's say that you don't particularly enjoy tank drive. You tried it in the last video, you gave it an honest shot, but let's try something else. If you choose the check button, you press that button, it'll rotate through to the next option, Split Arcade. You can press it again to go to Right Arcade, press it one more time to go to Left Arcade, and you can keep going back through that cycle. When you have decided on what controls you would like to use, you can go ahead, leave it right here, and you can select the X to go backwards to the previous menu.

I have shown you how to change those driver configuration options, but one thing before you start trying different ones is that we should talk about what each of these means. We know Tank Drive already is one motor per joystick. We'll use each joystick as a circle, and I've got the arrows showing me that this goes forwards and backwards, and that goes forwards and backwards.

The next option was Split Arcade. Split Arcade makes it so that one joystick controls left and right, and the other joystick controls forwards and backwards. Both motors are controlled by both joysticks. It's just a matter of your left and right versus your forward and reverse.

Now that we've talked about what Split Arcade looks like, let's see it in action. I've selected Split Arcade on my brain. As we go through that process, I have everything paired. One joystick is going to control the left and right. The other joystick is going to control forward and backwards. Now, if I try to do left and right, it's barely touching it just because it senses a little bit of forward and backwards. Or on the other side, if I go forward and backwards, it's not doing anything.

Thank you for watching this video on customizing your VEX IQ controller. We hope you found it helpful and informative. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out.

Stay tuned for more videos in the VEX Classroom series. Happy building and programming!

So, this could be really nice if I put my cube back in the center here. I know that I can just use this one to drive forward. Stop. I'm gonna turn, ooh, turned a little too fast. Drive forward. Have to remember those joysticks change your velocity. I'm gonna turn, forward, turn, forward.

So, you can see it's a little bit easier for me personally to use Split Arcade for this type of activity. But we do have two additional options as well. Our other two options are Left Arcade and Right Arcade. For both of these, it makes a difference on what joystick you're using. You're only using a single joystick.

On Left Arcade, as the name implies, you're only using the left joystick for forward, left, right, and down, and nothing is happening with your right joystick. Right Arcade is the exact same thing but opposite. So, nothing happening with the left, forward, right, left, and reverse.

So, you can see here, there are all these different options for how to control your robot. You can see that if you ever forget this, actually in that controls menu as well, it has a very similar breakdown of what these motions are on the controller.

Now, the other option here that I would highly recommend is creating some sort of engineering notebook and starting to take notes on these driver configurations. So we're actually gonna go through and do this as part of an activity. This is our Driver Configurations activity. In the Driver Configurations activity, it actually explains all of those different drive modes that we just went over: Tank Drive, Split Arcade, Right Arcade, Left Arcade. It has you drive around a cube on a field, the same type of activity that we did back in the previous lesson.

Now, we're gonna do this by testing every type of drive configuration. As you go through, it's really important for this to have data as well. In our pro tips, there's actually a wonderful image here of what a notebook could look like. You can make notes of what the controls are and how long it takes you to complete the activity using each of these Driver Configuration options.

We tell students all the time to make sure that they're writing things down, recording data, because then they can make a data-based decision on what is best for them. You could ask them things like, how does that feel to you? Did it feel good? Did it feel bad? But being able to explain why with concrete data, saying it took me 20 seconds longer with Tank Drive to drive around the cube than it did with Right Arcade, that's why I like Right Arcade better. You have that backing then built in, and that's something that you should practice also. As an educator, you can go through and have that as you do it as well.

So, now go ahead, pause the video, go through, test every drive configuration option, and drive it around the square, and make sure you're timing yourself for how long it takes.

I hope you had fun completing the driver configurations activity and that you had interesting observations as you test all four of those configuration options.

So, just to recap, we went over the four different options for Driver Configurations: Tank Drive, where each motor is controlled individually by a joystick; Split Arcade, where one joystick controls left and right and the other one controls forward and reverse. We also covered Left Arcade and Right Arcade, where just one joystick controls forwards, backwards, left, and right, and we went through how to change them on the brain.

Let's walk through that one more time just to make sure we're all on the same page. Since I just left my drive program when I was testing out my different configurations, I'm still in this drive menu. I can go over to the right three times over to controls. I'm gonna open that with the check mark and I can rotate through my different Driver Configurations by selecting the check mark.

Here, I want to use the Right Arcade. So, I'm gonna leave it here, press the X to go backwards, and then I can go back over using the left button over to the drive. Now, I can run my project and actually use the Right Arcade in order to drive my robot.

So, now you have completed the same activities using both coding and VEXcode IQ, as well as using the controller. You've gotten your robot around a cube multiple times to drive in a square or something along those lines. You can see all of those common things.

In future chapters, we are actually going to deconstruct our Speed Build and build your first robot using full build instructions called the BaseBot. We'll also go through so many other resources, and I can't wait to see what you end up doing with all this information in your classroom.

We'll see you next time.

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