Basic mecanum driving with clear joystick, motor-power, and safety lessons.
Before running: Ask your mentor first. Keep Driver Station STOP ready.
Read these steps before exploring the full program. The numbered blue comments in the diagram link back to the matching step.
The motors on opposite sides are mounted as mirror images. If all four received +1 without correction, one side would spin backward. Reversing the left motors in software makes +1 mean forward for every wheel. BRAKE means the motor actively holds still at zero power instead of coasting.
INIT means initialize: prepare the robot without allowing it to drive. waitForStart pauses here until the human presses START on the Driver Station. This safety boundary prevents joystick noise or unfinished setup from moving the robot early.
Each joystick axis reports a decimal from -1 to +1. Left-stick X means side-to-side, and left-stick Y means up/down. Controllers report pushing upward as a negative Y number, so the program multiplies it by -1 to make pushing forward produce positive forward motion. Right-stick X becomes rotation.
Normally speed is 1.0, meaning 100% of the calculated power. Holding the left bumper changes the scale to 0.35, or 35%. Multiplying every wheel by the same scale keeps the movement direction the same while making practice safer and more precise.
Absolute value removes the plus or minus sign, because we only need the size of each request. Adding |forward| + |strafe| + |turn| estimates the largest combined demand. A diagonal joystick command can otherwise ask a wheel for more than 1.0 power.
Motor power must stay between -1 and +1. If the denominator is less than 1, we replace it with 1 so we never make small commands larger. Dividing all wheels by the same denominator shrinks oversized values equally, preserving the intended direction and rotation.
Mecanum rollers let the robot combine three motions: forward, sideways, and turning. Each wheel needs a different plus/minus combination. For example, adding sideways power to one diagonal and subtracting it from the other diagonal creates a strafe without rotating the robot.
Telemetry is information the Robot Controller sends to the Driver Station screen. It does not control the robot. These rows help us debug by showing the joystick requests and the power actually sent to each motor.
The loop ends when STOP is pressed or communication ends. Explicitly writing zero to all four motors is a final safety step so no earlier power value can remain active.
Zoom in to follow the connections. Click a blue comment or focus its label and press Enter to revisit that lesson step.
Ask your mentor before importing or running these Blocks. A download does not set up or start the robot.
Safety: Read and predict before running. Verify the required hardware and configuration. Raise the wheels for the first motor test, keep one person ready to press STOP, and never rely on camera code as the only safety system.