I need a little help...
 

Hey everyone!
First season is creeping up and everyones getting ready, but our team is doing a little something special...
My New team is hosting a competition for us and the other local teams in our area (RIchmond, VA) using the Prototyping kit that FIRST supplies. Since we are using our own game design, we need to build a competition control box to operate the game.
I Have the pinouts for the Competition port concerning the Channel Switch and the Disable option, but there are still a few more thing I would like to know:
1. I know FIRST supplies power to the OI through this port at the competition, so how do you do this?
2. If you cant do this (or easily) then is it still possible to operate the oi with competition control while the oi is using the adapter?
3. The Channel Switch: I'm still a little confused about what exactly this does. If you jumped the pins for the channel selection on four bots at the same time, would they each select a different channel automatically? or is there another set of pins that feeds the channel value to the oi? In my reading of the OI manual, I beleive that if you jump the pins, it autoselects a channel that has a RC (Robot Controller) with the matching team number. so, you could use up to 4 bots simutainously (it only supports 4 different channels). What if 2 robots transmit their team # over the same channel?
So, as you can se, I think I'm understanding it, but I'd like a confirmation from someone else. I understand that various teams here host competitions, so I would assume that someone out there has to know the answer. We are planning on having the competition this fall.
I can't say anything about the game guys, I'm sorry, but the teams participating may be watching and they're not supposed to know til' kickoff :)
Anyway, I would like it if you could help me ASAP.
Thanx!

Re: I need a little help...
 

The pinout used by the power feed to the OI from the arena controller has not been documented. It may be worth trying to get from IFI, but no guarantees...
If you basically extend the disable switch wires, then yes you can, channel selection gets a little tricky though...
The channel jumper on the competition port basically enables the channel switch. You then need to use the channel switch to set which of the 4 additional channels the OI will use. Your understanding of how the channel search is done is close, but slightly backward. The OI locks onto a channel when it is powered on, and then when the robot is powered on, it scans all 40 channels for an OI broadcasting the matching team number. If two robots transmit under the same channel, you will see intermittent loss of communication from both machines, as the default behavior for the RC if it recieves data on its locked channel with the wrong team number is to go into disabled mode, just as if it was recieving no data at all...

So, now my question is, How does the competition port at the actual competitions make it so that you don't have to mess with your Channel Dipswitches?

Because the event competition port cable does a lot more than just jumper the channel select pins together...there is another piece of electronics known as an arena controller which actually communicates with the OI to do things such as setting up the radio channel, providing power, etc...

Cool. The only thing I know how to do is to come up with mock version of a competition port cable to get access to 4 extra channels including channel 40. This becomes very useful when u want to do a 100% real mockup version of a 2 minute game with 4 robots. :D we also have a special switch thingy that we "borrowed" from FIRST. we kinda needed it to use it at CBS 2 to run us 759 and 121 so that we can do a lil demo on a 2 minute game. anyone who went to the NYC regionals should remember the saturday where the comp. was held up till all 3 teams member representatives and robots got back to Columbia so they could start the qual matches. anyways the teams that went to CBS 2 news station was suppose to give back those adapters so they could be used another time but. 522 kinda forgot and was a lil 2 late since it was shipped with the bot to FL.
:D :D

I think I have a solution...
Well, I pretty much understand how it works now. Thanks alot!
So, since we probably won't be having but about 10 teams, we'll just give them a channel number to set on their board, and add that to the inspection list, just to make sure they do it.
Thanks For the Help Guys!
I Guess we'll leave this area open for anyone else who needs help with anything...
Oh, and we will have access to video from this event on our website as soon as it's done. (I wish I could run it webcast, but I doubt vcu school of Engineering has a good connection we could plugin to...)