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

Hey, my team is going to put LED lights on our robot. What colors can you use on the robot while playing the game?? Also, where do you buy these LED lights???

Pleas help! :)

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

You can use any color you want to. Team colors are never a bad choice. We buy all of ours from SuperBrightLEDs

Just don't forget you need 12v LEDs. As for how you light them up, you can either connect straight to the PDB and have them turn on when you have the power switch on, or you can run them off the spike relays and control when you light them up

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

In past years our teams has used these...

http://www.amazon.com/SANOXY-Cold-Ca...dp/B000BUDHOA/

for lighting our robot (and driver's station). They can get a bit hard to fit into the robot though - particularly this year with the smaller frame - so we will likely be looking into different options.

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

Thanks so much Team driven! REALLY appreciate it!

So just to clarify, we could use pink LEDs on our robot while playing on the field? I didn't know if there was a certain rule that said you couldn't.

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

Just remember that your LEDs can't interfere or cause a hazard to any drivers' vision-- make sure they aren't too bright (I know this has never been an issue, but as a member of a competition team last year, I really hope it's addressed this year, because it can be really distracting and annoying as a driver).

Of course, I doubt it will be, but still, be courteous to your opponents and your teammates!

Note: This typically isn't an issue if the LEDs aren't directed at a particular place; it was mostly a problem last year because some of the goals were at eye level.

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

No rules against using LEDs as long as it isn't intended to interfere with drivers or robots

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

Awesome! Thanks for your help guys. I really appreciate it!

We will make sure they are concealed well.

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

We used this strand of individually addressable LED's from Adafruit last year:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/306

They have arduino code, which is what we used last year, which we interfaced to the cRio (clunkily) through a pair of digital outputs. This year, I took the Arduino library and adapted it to use the SPI.h interface in Wpilib, so we should be able to have the lights respond to a lot more robot, driver, and game actions, and the wiring will be simpler.

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

Another great place to get 12V LED's is automotive stores, or the automotive department at places like Walmart. 12V LED strips are used by many to add interior accent lighting to their cars (like under the dash), and are perfectly compatible with the FRC electrical system. They most often have adhesive backs, can be applied either straight or curved, and can be plugged directly into the 12V WAGO connectors on the PDB.

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

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlights-Blue...words=blue+led

Just make sure that whatever lighting strip you use meets the custom circuits guidelines and is on an appropriate circuit. For instance, the lights we use need to be cut so we don't draw too much power from the solenoid breakout.

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

Sounds like a pretty cool idea. (:

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

we have Ring light (fc13-060)
any Idia who we cane conect, we try using from PD 20 A conecting with Power Converter CPR-360 (am-0899) .
any paper about that

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

To connect the ring light, you can lead it straight back to the power distribution board and one of the 20 amp slots. If you'd like to turn it on and off, you'll need to hook it to a spike (or a talon/victor/jag if you want variable control).

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

The Ring Light is a 12V device - it needs to be hooked up to one of the 12V outputs from the PDB - the red and black WAGO connectors - or to a spike if you want on/off control.

Unless you have two Power Converters on your robot, it should only be used with the radio - no other electrical loads can be connected to it, per R44. Using a second one connected to the normal 12V outputs and an appropriately sized breaker would be allowed as a custom circuit, if you needed the 5V output for something.

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

Are you communicating to the Arduino over spi or directly to the lights over spi?

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.

Re: LED's For Robot
 

We use the NFLS-X3 series LED strip from SuperBrightLEDs, connected to the solenoid breakout. It's about $1 a foot. It can be cut into smaller sections. You'll also want one NFLS10-2CPTH solderless pigtail adapter per section. I can't remember whether one comes with a strip -- you'll need to check.

http://www.superbrightleds.com/morei...ht-strip/1440/

Re: LED's For Robot
 

Here is a very cool example of what can be done with LEDs on robots. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06c-6VXEHrg only pay attention to the first ten seconds XD in 2011, we had the first logo flash on our robot in, if i remember correctly, 40 LEDs. One shape at a time. It really fit the game, and it taught people a simple electronics at the same time. As for power, it was using power from the distributions board.

Re: LED's For Robot
 

We planned to have a strip of LEDs with an Arduino Uno board, then wire it directly to the PD board. Although we weren't able to mount it to our robot (due to weight limitations) we placed it on the robot cart. We purchased the Arduino at http://www.adafruit.com/products/50
and downloaded the library for the LPD8806 strip
http://www.adafruit.com/products/306

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

Ok thanks. We might do that in case we cant wire it to the crio.

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

We use 8 Shift Brite's.

While it would probably be possible to use the SPI on the cRio to control them, we used an Arduino and spare Relay Out ports with external pull downs for control. We send a 3-bit command nibble to the Arduino which sets the LED states for that state. This gives us 8 possible LED combinations controllable by the cRio with 3 digital lines, but only 1 combination when disabled (relay outputs are disabled).

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

I was looking at Strip LED's from superbrightleds and saw the Red, Green, Blue and Black wires. I'm pretty sure that the Red, Green, and Blue is the positive for the LED colors and black is the ground. I know wiring enough to wire our robot's components, but I don't know how I would hook 1 ground up to 3 spikes. I'm sure there is a way, I just dont know it.

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

One spike gets Ground and one signal.

The other gets two Signals (you only need two Spikes)

The spike with Ground is used in forward-only mode for the signal.

The other spike is used in forward-reverse mode, the forward phase is for one signal and the reverse phase is for the other signal.

You could alternatively run ground back to the PD board and skip the Spikes altogether. There's nothing saying the Spike requires the ground to return through it.

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

Assuming you're correct and the black wire is the power return, you don't need to connect it to a Spike at all. You can wire it directly to a black terminal on the Power Distribution Board. Or you can wire it to one of the V- inputs on one of the Spikes and share the Spike's return connection. Wire the R G B wires to any three Spike outputs you like, on either two or three Spikes, leaving any leftover Spike outputs unconnected.

Or you can wire it to the M- output of one Spike, and never turn that half of the Spike on (restrict the Spike to OFF and FORWARD).

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

Ok thanks!

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

Does anyone have code for java that I can look at?

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

I am looking for the same thing. Code for Java to strictly use DIO to work with https://www.adafruit.com/products/306 would help a lot.

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

Has anyone tried using the NeoPixel LEDs from Adafruit?
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1376

They are supposed to be simpler to wire and cheaper than the old 32 LED kind, but I haven't seen anyone using them.

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

I could see somebody doing some pretty nifty things with a LED board like these

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

We are using two types of LED strips on our robot this year: 1. Common Anode RGB strips (same color for the entire strip) and 2. individually addressable LED strips based on the WS2811 LEDs. I'm not sure the cRio could handle the individually addressable ones so we're offloading the code to drive both strip types onto two arduino nanos. They'll get their control information from the cRio in the form of either a digital I/O or a PWM.

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

Attached is the Java code we used last year to run the Adafruit addressable lights directly from the digital side car DIO ports. We used a 5V transformer to supply the power (same unit used to power the D-link radio). Hope it helps.

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

It would not be possible to control them with the cRIO due to the timing requirements. You would have to use an Arduino with their code, so I'm not sure it would be easier to wire.

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

Team 118 used lights on their bot, Apex, last year. I don't know if they were LEDs, but they did have multiple colored strings/arrangements. It should be fine.

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

Is it legal to hardwire LED lights on to the Power Distribution Board?

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

We use these bad boys on a spike!

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

I can't think of any rule that would prohibit it. As long as they don't violate any other rules (e.g. disrupting other robots' vision sensing), it should be fine.

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

Thank Alan. :)

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

My team bought them from AndyMark here: http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-2645.htm

You can buy them as a kit or seperate, but it does require an Arduino (comes with the kit)

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

I got the strips directly from a Chinese factory, GREELED, which always keeping in developing new interesting products. Such as their newest developed 60 LED/M LPD8806 RGB Strip and 96 LED/M WS2812B Digital Strip. They also supply technique help in warm hearted.

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

We used these on our robot and driver station panel: http://www.amazon.com/LEMONBEST-SMD-...ords=led+strip

You can see a little bit of them working in our reveal video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ALN_3AoyU

It's been brought up that these cheep LED strands use IR, so the are hard to control via the Rio, but we ended up taking the control box and manually wiring in three PWM lines directly to the FETs inside. This lets us use the 5V PWM output to control the intensity of each color individually, and the 12V line just comes from the PDB. I'm working on a write up that I hope to post soon on how to do this, and our team will probably make a custom PCB in the future for it that we'll share with the community.

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

We bought the same LED strip and built a simple control board using a couple of MOSFETS. You can control the brightness of each color by switching the MOSFETS on and off using PWM. The only problem with getting it to work off of the cRIO's PWM ports are that the PWM frequency is too slow (causing the strip to blink quickly instead of appear to be dimming). I read that the max frequency that the cRIO pwm runs at is 200Hz. Does anyone know of a workaround or a way to get the PWM to work at a higher frequency?

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

Speed controllers and servos use Servo PWM which is really a short pulse sent at a defined rate. That is what has a 200hz limit. It is not what you want you would want to use for controlling your LEDs.

Rather, the digital outputs support true PWM, and let you define the frequency and duty cycle. Look at the digital outputs API.

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

I wouldn't think it would be that bad. The arduino can in reality take up to a 20V input, so accepting an unregulated battery shouldn't be too much of an issue. Just preprogram the Arduino with certain states to control the neopixels, then let the cRio/roboRio tell the Arduino which state to be in.

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

I didn't realize that it was possible to get more customized PWM out of the DIO pins as well. Thank you very much, that should solve our problem.

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

For the last 2 years, we have used those 12v single-color LED strips you can order on Amazon. Simple, but effective. This coming year, we hope to use individually-addressable RGBLED strips that we purchased from andymark recently. We have developed a basic little custom circuit that we use for the lights on the robot. All it is is a terminal block connected to the PDB through a switch. This way, we can turn off all the lights if needed, and their connections don't take up valuable space on the PDB.

(protip: those adhesive backs on the light strips don't work, packing tape works great though ;) )

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

Similar to other teams, our robot this year we used the Sparkfun addressable RGBs (uses WS2812 LED drivers internally to the strip).

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12026

You only have to plug in 5V, GND and the 1-wire interface which we drove using an Arduino and the Adafruit WS2812 libraries (details in the Sparkfun hookup guide). The power was supplied by a 5V/10A regulator very similar to the one supplied for the router (no 5V source on the robot is capable of supplying this much current). Additionally, we used an LED diffuser film to spread out the light source. This helped us give the effect that the arms were filled with light, where there was only a strip of RGB LEDs running through the top side of each arm.

https://www.inventables.com/technolo...diffuser-films

The Arduino allowed us to program light patterns that were triggered by the cRIO's digital outputs when the robot performed various actions (e.g. feeding, shooting, cocking the catapult). For instance, when the feeder motor was running, the robot would pull a zero on a cRIO digital output which fed into a digital input on the Arduino. Every 10ms, the Arduino firmware checked the digital inputs for changes and would modify the light pattern accordingly.

This may get a bit detailed for those not familiar with embedded programming, but the key to making these animations work fluidly and seamlessly (and respond to asynchronous input) was to program the Arduino an interrupt-driven model. The simplest way to get patterns to display is to shift in the colors to each LED (24 in our case) and then to delay() for the number of milliseconds until the next color pattern needed to be shifted. In Arduino speak, these delay() statements literally force the processor to sit and wait for a number of milliseconds and not do anything (this is an eternity for a processor).

In the interrupt-driven model, these delay() statements are replaced by conditional checks on variables (sometimes called flags) which are set by interrupts based on events (in our case, a 10ms timer interrupt since there weren't enough IRQ-capable pins). Every 10ms, the timer would interrupt the processor, check all of the inputs for any updates from the cRIO and it would increment a timer variable that counted the number of 10ms interrupts that passed. This variable could be checked by the main program to determine how many seconds had elapsed and whether or not it was time for the next pattern to be pushed to the LEDs.

In our reveal video, we hadn't yet finished coding all of the patterns, but you can see what the diffuser material looks like up close:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEhQnKbRz-0

You can see the patterns when we drive/load/shoot pretty well in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOK7eQOLqag#t=300