The Moto tab provides an interface for testing Garcia's motors.

The Moto tab as it appears in Windows

The "Stop" Buttons

In the Moto pane, the left slider controls the left motor and the right slider controls the right motor.  The center position of a slider is off.  Moving a slider up makes the motor spin one way, moving a slider down makes it spin the other way.  The "Stop" buttons will automatically put the corresponding slider in the center off position and stop the motor.

The "Zero" Button

Above each slider is an encoder display.  As the motors spin forward, these values will increase.  As the motors spin backward, these values will decrease so you may see negative values.  The zero button sets each encoder display back to 0 and resets the encoder values inside the robot.

The "Damping" Check Box

This check box enables or disables velocity damping.  When velocity damping is enabled, the robot changes speed incrementally.  When the damping mode is changed, the motors will be set to zero.

The "Damp Const" Text Box

The value in this box determines the damping constant, or rate at which velocity will change when velocity damping is enabled.  The units for this value are milliseconds.  If the value is 100, then the robot's speed will increase or decrease by one unit every 100ms when a new velocity is given to the motors.

The "Apply" Button

This button stores the damping constant in the GarciaTool application.  This change will be applied to the robot when the velocity damping mode changes from disabled to enabled.  The damping constant won't change while damping mode is enabled.

Current Graphs

The bars at the bottom of each slider are current graphs.  A red bar will grow from left to right as the current running through the motors increases.  A full red bar represents a load of 1.5 Amps.  The motors are very efficient, so most of the time the bars will show only a small segment of red.  If you grab the motors in order to stall them, you will probably see a big red bar.  And then you will probably blow Garcia's fuse!  So don't do that.