Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

We are using the individually addressable LED's from Adafruit hooked up to a couple DIO ports and calling them directly from the cRIO using SPI in Java. Super cool... with one strand you can dial in any color/pattern you want.

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

I have gotta learn how to do that. Is it possible in C++?

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

Yes... should be even easier than in Java. Start with the C++ Arduino code posted on Adafruit and then replace the Arduino SPI calls with WPILib SPI calls.

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

"3528 Type SMD"
That's great for Up Next, but where can I get some 1806 Type SMD? ;)

In all seriousness, I was looking at some RGB Lights with separate leads for R, B, and G like these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA0WP0M58573. We'd hook the separate leads up to a 3-way switch, and use green (a team color) for practice, and red or blue on the field based on what alliance we're on.

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

We bought a Ton of lights from Greeled.
We made a huge group purchase from there of both RGB and addressable.

Here is the RGB we bought, at about $32 a 5m roll with glue cover waterproofing.

They sell the same addressable strip as Adafruit for something like $85 per 5m roll with no waterproofing. It was a breeze to program on arduino using Adafruit's library.


You have to email for current pricing and to order, and I think payment might have involved wiring money, but it sure was worth it.

I should have a pic of my desk up later which has the RGB lights on it.

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

Just out of curiosity, some RGB light strips come with a IR controller, would we use these or is it because it is IR, it would no be allowed during competition?

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

IR is fine, just no radio.

You may not want to be changing colors mid-match though ;)

EDIT:

New user, telling us to buy a bulk order with expensive shipping using only Western Union or Cash Wire?...... Tread carefully guys...

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

What about just having three switches on the robot, just for the 3 base colors, would that work, and does anyone have an example?

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

We've been custom-making our ring lights for the past several years. In 2011, it seemed as if we were one of the only teams, and then in 2012 everyone had them. We just wire up 12 LED's on a circular cutout of perfboard. There are 3 series sets of 4 parallel ~3.5V LED's with appropriate resistors. We use white LED's, but you can use any color. The only restrictions are that it doesn't interfere with communications, other robots' vision, and other commonsense bad things.

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

Our sister team 1987 had told me about controlling LEDs via solenoid breakout card. It works very easily for 7 color RGB strips according to them. I am not sure of the specifics, or even who to tell you to talk to. If I can get more information I'll post it.

Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)
 

We use these
http://www.superbrightleds.com/cat/f...rips-and-bars/

And get blue/red/white.
The white we hook up to the PDB so it's always on, and it's in our chassis to illuminate it. The red/blue we put into any type of mechanism we have and they're both hooked up to spikes. We have a light switch that goes to a Digital I/O port that way programmers don't recompile code each match, we flip the light switch one way and its red when the robot is enabled - other way blue.

As an added bonus, turn both lights on for autonomous and since they're right next to one another, it turns it purple. :D

http://i.imgur.com/z9lww3N.jpg They look pretty snazzy and gives a different effect from all the other teams that mostly light up at the bottom.

LED's For Robot
 

Hello. I was wondering how my team can put LED's on our robot and wire them up to be controlled by robot code. Thanks!

Re: LED's For Robot
 

So there are 2 basic ways you can control via code. You can use spike relays as on or off switches. The second way is to use a solenoid breakout to connect LEDs. To use that method is the same as programming for a festo only it runs on a single channel not 2. The neat thing about using the solenoid breakout is that it takes no extra space on the robot and you only need 3 channels to run 7 colors (if you have RGB LEDs of course). Be aware that there is a limit as to how many watts you can use, but for most scenarios you should be fine.

Re: LED's For Robot
 

We have a strip of tri-color LEDs on our robot. One of our mentors constructed a small circuit with 3 MOSFETs, one for each color. We then control them through PWM, which allows us to have varying brightness for each color.

Re: LED's For Robot
 

Ok thanks guys. Joe you guys did amazing today and thanks for the help today with our robot drive. My mentor wants us to do the LED thing for our robot that we use for community events. So hopefully I can get this done.