pic: Team 296 Control Board

[Pat Fairbank]

[cdm-description=photo]22861[/cdm-description]

[Tytus Gerrish]

Beautifulll!

[chrisinmd]

nice board!
I like your joystick handles, most teams seem to be modding the KOP sticks and having good results.
Did the feel of the joystick change when you put the new handles on?
We're thinking of doing something similar this year.
-Chris

[alphastryk]

i like the joysicks.

do those help increase the spring strength of the sticks? i know they are really wobbly as they come in the kit.

[lukevanoort]

Sweet! I wonder if my team would let me do that... probably not since we don't have enough screwdrivers as it is and we're using CH Flightsticks anyway.

[Kim Masi]

that has to be the most awesome control board i've seen! i really like the crisp, industrial look...we will post a pic of our control system soon after ship, prepared to be amazed.

how much does it weigh?

[Pat Fairbank]

how much does it weigh?It weights 14 lbs, and is made primarily of 28mm extrusion and 1/8" Lexan.

do those help increase the spring strength of the sticks? i know they are really wobbly as they come in the kit.The modded joysticks are a lot better than they used to be (we also epoxy'ed the trim tabs into place) but there still seems to be some looseness where the stick attaches to the pots.

The screwdriver modification was really easy to do. We bought the screwdrivers for about $9, blowtorched the steel until it melted the plastic enough to be removable, then bored the handle and stuck it onto the joystick base.

[xur2007]

Nice...just curious, did you use lexan or plexi?

[lukevanoort]

Nice...just curious, did you use lexan or plexi?

It weights 14 lbs, and is made primarily of 28mm extrusion and 1/8" Lexan.

Reading does wonders.

[DarkFlame145]

Nice, screw drivers

[Josh Goodman]

That's looks ridiculously cool! Props!

[Ethulin]

What are the dimensions of that board?
How did you bend the Lexan for your OI?

[cardinalman86]

man, that is totally awesome.

[artdutra04]

How did you bend the Lexan for your OI?If you use a heat gun to heat up Lexan, you can bend it and it will retain the bend when it cools.

[EricRobodox]

careful heating it though, it can bubble and somewhat ruin the integrity of the plastic. Learned that my freshman year. Normally you should be ok, but dont leave the heat on too long with lexan, let alone any plastic. If it does bubble, it should still be ok, just wont look as good.

[Illegalsocks]

that control board is incredimazing. good job team 296.

[zacattack]

Looks awesome, especially with the 80/20.

[nreyesciena]

Wow, that looks pretty heavy. Last year ( my last year as team member, now a mentor) I was the robot driver, I made the control board out of lexan and that thing weighted a lot, big mistake since I was the one having the carry it all the way to the station and back, especially in Atlanta :( We painted it to resemble a retro NES controller, the two red buttons being the drive joysticks and the D-pad being the manipulator/arm/whateverdeviceusedtohandlegamepieces but we scrapped that one when we simply cut off our the robot arm. Oh yeah the OI was the Start / Select buttons.

[Matt H.]

I would also worry about the weight. Is that going to be a team lift? This year team 1726 is taking a minimalistic approach to OI design in hopes of being better able to carry it around.

[lasereyes]

Do you have buttons on those?

[EricVanWyk]

If you use a heat gun to heat up Lexan, you can bend it and it will retain the bend when it cools.

Be careful. Some people have been known to do this and then drop the heat gun next to the battery.

We had a particularly bad mentor that insisted on doing things by himself. This means he didn't have nearly enough hands for the operation, and ended up burning one of our batteries.


On a separate note - NICE.

[Tal Nitzan]

Sweet! love it!

[x7shaddow]

Looks good, I reli like the idea of modded KoP joysticks, espically if one driver has to use two, it just feels so akwars using a right-handed joystick in your left hand.

[basicxman]

cool! controlling the bot with screwdrivers!!! that's worth of recognition in the jedi archives ( sorry i just saw star wars)

[Pat Fairbank]

Just so everyone's on the same page, this picture is in fact from two years ago.

We're going to try something similar this year on the team I'm with now (1503), but it's going to be slightly more difficult with the need for buttons for shifting and whatnot (the 296 screwdriver-sticks didn't have buttons).

[BlackBird11891]

i like the extrusion aluminum

[seraphim33]

thats a slick control board :cool: nice

[296Minion]

That thing looks familiar?