Lights on your robot
 

Lighting up our robot would be awesome this year but to get a perspective of what the community usually uses I would like to ask a couple of questions.

Where do you get your lights from? What are you using to control them? I was thinking a raspi.

We have dabbled a little in lights but never too much, but if it isn't that hard we would like to do some this year.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

We are using RGB light strips and an arduino to control them. It's basicly this. This year we are trying to sync our driver station lights and our robot lights.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

Although I don't know of we'll have the weight this year, but if we do I've ordered some adafruit neopixels. They are rgb individually addressable and have pre made arduino libraries. We will then use a few dio on our rev more board to communicate with an arduino what pre programed patterns we want to run. That's the plan anyways.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

We usually order the LPD-8806 strips from Adafruit. This year we are controling them using the RoboRio's SPI port.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

We use the KOP blinky light, it's orange, and we usually mount it so it's visible from the front of the robot. We also like the little blinky lights on the speed controllers, and there are some on the new RoboRio.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

We bought a 5m strip of RGB LEDs from sparkfun - non addressable. We're not using any of the relay ports this year for functional items, so we'll switch them using a couple of spikes. The next option would have been some DIO ports and smaller relay modules, followed by an external CPU (e.g. arduino) and relay modules.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

We typically use one of the addressable strips from Adafruit, driven by an Arduino, taking messages from the robot software over I2C. Last year we used the NeoPixels, and while they were great, the timing required to drive them meant that interrupts were disabled on the Arduino, so we couldn't use I2C, and used digital I/O lines instead. Not ideal.

This year we are using the new DotStar strips from Adafruit. They are like the happy offspring of the LPD-8806 driver strip, and the NeoPixels. Nice and bright, no external driver chip for the LEDs, one more signal wire, but not as tight timing for signals, so you get interrupts back! So far we are really liking them.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

We are using Adafruit Neopixels being driven with a Teensy from PJRC. Communication is done through the USB port with the Teensy emulating a serial port. The display is used to communicate information to the drive team allowing them to keep their eyes on the robot. When the robot is disabled then the display shows the team number and scrolls messages.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

Two good places to get LED strips and such are:
- SparkFun (as mentioned above) https://www.sparkfun.com/
- SuperBrightLEDs https://www.superbrightleds.com/

That's where we usually get ours. Also, Arduinos are a pretty solid and simple control option.

I went the cheap route and ordered a led strip from amazon with a remote and power supply. After I cut the wire on the power supply and connected it to the vrm It was brought to my attention that ir receivers were illegal in match. So I cut the ir receiver and put pwm connections on each end. It works and is legal now but was a lot of work. It also only costs 25 dollars and being I personally payed for them it's worth it.

548 did nearly that on our shooter for Worlds and States.

Re: Lights on your robot
 

Also if you would like to look at our code for the lights its here