The SpeedController Interface

The cRIO's outputs cannot supply the current necessary to power the robot's motors. To control the motors, we use physical speed controllers that act like a pipe valve, allowing the cRIO's tiny current to vary the larger current going directly from the battery to the motors. The WPILibrary gives us the SpeedController interface for dealing with speed controllers. As SpeedController is an interface, we can't use it directly. To use it we must use one of the classes that implements SpeedController. The WPILibrary provides three: Talon, Victor, and Jaguar.

###Methods SpeedController provides two important methods:

• get() returns the current speed assigned to the speed controller as a double between -1.0 and 1.0.
• set(speed) sets the speed of the speed controller as a double between -1.0 and 1.0.