Wireless Robot Interface

[mole]

Hey everyone,

I was wondering if anyone knew how to receive and input information to/from the robot wirelessly using a laptop?? I am planning to make a interface allowing the driver to communicate with the robot and so they can receive information about the status of the robot. (battery lvl, heat of motors...)

Thanks

[Racer26]

Use the dashboard port on the OI. This is the only legal method at competition.

and it can only be used for output. Robot can only receive input from switches and stuff attached to the OI

[Alan Anderson]

For development at your own facility, the simplest solution would be a Bluetooth serial link. See http://www.blueconsole.com/ for one option.

At a FIRST competition, the rules currently prohibit any wireless communication to/from the robot other than the provided radios. There's no practical way to send data from a laptop, but you can receive from the robot using the dashboard port. You've got six bytes of user data in the dashboard stream to work with, and you can "borrow" unused PWM outputs for telemetry information as well. The battery voltage is already provided in the dashboard data.

[programMORT11]

We wrote a gui in python this year to display information about the robot (wheel direction, end effector height, etc.) and the best way was to use the dashboard port on the OI to send back serial packet data

[Tom Schindler]

For development at your own facility, the simplest solution would be a Bluetooth serial link. See http://www.blueconsole.com/ for one option.

At a FIRST competition, the rules currently prohibit any wireless communication to/from the robot other than the provided radios. There's no practical way to send data from a laptop, but you can receive from the robot using the dashboard port. You've got six bytes of user data in the dashboard stream to work with, and you can "borrow" unused PWM outputs for telemetry information as well. The battery voltage is already provided in the dashboard data.


How well does this work? Does it allow for debugging of data while the robot is running? This would make programming significantly easier!

Also, do you know of anyplace you can purchase these? The site says they are no longer selling them.

Thanks!

[Ian Curtis]

How well does this work? Does it allow for debugging of data while the robot is running? This would make programming significantly easier!

Also, do you know of anyplace you can purchase these? The site says they are no longer selling them.

Thanks!

www.sparkfun.com

I'm sure you can find other places as well.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

http://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Serial-Adapter-Class-1/dp/B000CPMBO6

[mole]

Our team is trying to mount some different types of sensors to give us basic data about the robot's condition during the match. The information would be sent through the OI into a display.

Do you think this is possible?

[Mike AA]

Our team is trying to mount some different types of sensors to give us basic data about the robot's condition during the match. The information would be sent through the OI into a display.

Do you think this is possible?

Are you looking to have the information on the laptop or on another form of screen? Also is this something you are looking to do next year or is this an off season project? Depending on what exactly you are looking to do, much of the dashboard program (using the dashboard port via serial cable) will give you values to items you want to read, you would just have to set this in code.

-Mike

[mole]

this is for next year and for the off-season. We were planning to have it displayed on some sort of screen or a laptop it doesnt matter.

[virtuald]

I created an embedded web server that you can run on the bot. You can use it to display/modify any variables that you want. C++ only.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76928