Controll Board/Panel
 

Hello all controlers and drivers

if you guys build your controll board what materials have u found that work good? Wood, lexan? I built a really nice one last year out of lexan, if you had happen to see it, tell me what u think. I just wanted to get some opinions for this year. Does anyone have any good ways to fasten lexan, screws, glue? Should i make a folding controll panel, ..have fun, see ya around!

I drew up a sketch of an idea ive had for a couple of months, if you want to see it, my aim sn is inki140, or i just might post it up in the gallery later

i was the programmer, and also wound up building the controls, since i was the only person who knew how everything went together :). i built a nice big one, because we had planned on using a laptop, and a dashboard program, but that didn't work, and it wound up being way to heavy and big. i've realized that for next year all we want is a small wooden one, cause it's lighter, and it's easier to do. lexan is pretty, but it's way to heavy.

for our first regional i whipped up a plywood panel, it was better than nothing, then made an extravagant lexan one, it was quite large and it the joysticks were inlayed, it was heavy, but it looked sharp, i think if i were to do it again, i would make more of a closed box and not use such a thick grade of lexan, all and all it was good, but, i take pride in my panel! lol
so im looking to go all out this year, considering its my senior year and its important to treat us drivers well!

I did the design for my control board last year, it took me the whole last Sunday to sit down with no sleep, and figure it out. It is really nice looking, however, the other driver doesn't like it that well. He says it's to girlish/pretty. I'm not sure what type of driver set up you are looking for but I will describe ours.

We used a really fancy type of wood. I don't remember what it was, but the engineers were shocked when they saw that we spray painted it. :) I believe it is something around 3 1/2 feet long, and about 8" deep. We have two joysticks (one for each driver), and they are found at each end of the board. On the end with the base driver you will find the radio on the outside of the joystick, and the interface on the inside of the joystick. On the other end of the board is the second joystick, which ran Moose and the braking system, and on the inside of that you would find the control/button box. *evulish had a big part in making the box, and it looks very 'ghetto'* The box runs the left and right arm and the rotating independently of both of them.

The board is spray painted blue, and on my side, in the top corner is the infamous Moose symbol, and on the other driver side is the Chuck 84 logo. I have stickers incorrectly labeling the control box, and the buttons, stickers, and control box cover are all a blue (team color)... with red and white for a patriotic look.

You can find a much better description of the board by just taking a look at it yourself in my Who Am I picture.
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Ohh yeah. That was a fun project to do at 4-6am. It took HOURS to make a freaking box with 4 buttons covered with felt. I don't even remember what we used to cut the plastic with but it's not straight...It took a lot of work with a utility knife to shave down the edges of the square so the buttons would fit in it and click. Then we made some of the holes too big :) That screwed us over for drilling the holes into the plastic to secure the buttons. And after I finished screwing in all the buttons, I noticed I had put them on the wrong way...I had screwed the buttons on the outside rather than the inside of the box. Heh.

Oh yeah. Drilling through felt doesn't work very well :P It rips off huge chunks and messes up the bit.

i recomend at band saw and a small belt sander for lexan panels, it the band saw it too dull, the lexan may melt a little at the cut, but thats ok, u just have to scrape of the burnt shavings.

what was the coolest thing uve seen done with a panel?

Control board?!? What's this control board you all speak of? We barely finished soldering the button box before shoving everything in the crate. Our so-called "control board" involved my hands full of the OI, Radio, Button-box and joystick hanging from their respective cords as I ran from one corner of the pits to our competition on Einstein.

Oh... you asked what worked good. Forget everything I just said and never follow this example. I know we never will again (we've been saying that for three years now).

I have begun to think about possibilities for the design of my new board.... all I have to do is promise not to paint it and make it girly again this year. ;)

So, I was wondering if anyone from Cybersonics (103) would care to share the design of their control board? Or, if anyone has seen their board.... do you have any hints or recommendations?

We used 3/8in Lexan two years ago and it worked great everything was just velcroed on and it only weighed like 5 pds. Last year we used 1/2in Lexan and put a hinge on it and used velcro but it weight like 12 pds and flipped the wrong way.

Some pointers:
-Use 3/8in Lexan not 1/2in
-Make it one big piece, granted it does take up more space but its lighter and eaiser to handle
-Take all your boxes and joysticks and mark out where they are going to be on the panel, make sure ther driver can reach what he/she needs to reach and make sure the co-pilot can do the same with out crossing arms with anybody.

We've used several control board schemes since I joined my team, and all were very different. The first one I used was our 2000 board, a one-piece wood board. It had 3 sticks, so it was pretty short and fit in our crate. The 2001 board, however, required 4 sticks, so we made a 2-piece wood board with space underneath for all the wires. It worked okay, but the two pieces were a pain to carry. Last year, we decided to make it all one piece, but in a tri-fold design. It was easy to store and carry, but we bent our radio antenna three times with it. We still have yet to devise the perfect board.

Last year my team had a large lexan box with all of our components in it. It was about 2 inches thick so the controls (the two sticks and the box with toggle switches on it) were flush with the front and the controller board was held inside, but still visible through the lexan. Everything was velcro-ed together so we could take everything out and put it back it the right spot with ease and the modem was velcro-ed onto the outside. This made for a rather heavy box, though, so we put wheels on one end and a handle on the other so we could roll it around and this worked very well. If only our bot worked as well as our controls...

Re: Controll Board/Panel
 

A wonderful chemical called chloroform is a bonding agent used to meld polycarbonate. Note, I did not say glue, the chemical breaks the bonds of lexan and reforms them. It is a carcinogenic chemical that is usually sold where ever you can buy polycarb.

2000: board built out of plywood and zipties
2001: board built out of acrylic to save money
2002: board built out of polycarb, folded in the middle, and had a handle

I spent a grand total of about an hour knocking together this control panel for our EduRobot. It works just fine, and left a lot of time for working on other aspects of the robot (like figuring out how to put two pieces of beam back together when you cut one too short because you translated "measure twice, cut once" into "cut first, ask questions later"). It's small, it's compact, it's lightweight, and it doesn't cost very much (pegboard is real cheap!) and it doubles as a lunch tray when the pizza arrives...



-dave

I dont rember what we did in 2000, in 2001 we took a piece of think lexan and bolted it to 1 piece of bosch extrusion so it had a nice angle to it, then velcroed everything down. It slipped in the Hp Station so we double taped some leftover belting to the extrusion so it wouldnt slip anymore. Last year we took a piece of plywood, gave it a nice paint job, wrapped the edges with our black and white tape and velcroed everthing down again. Then we decided it needed somthign to help it to be more carryable, so we went to home depot, spent 3 bux on some cabinet handles and put one on each end. A few times thoes had ropes attached to them for following the robot with the tether. I liked the way it worked this year simple and effective...Big suprise.

My advice is to not spend a whole lot of time on the material of the board, a simple wood job will do just fine. Spend you're time seriously planning out were the stick(s) will go, where the button boxes will go, and possibly most important, the button/switch layout on each box. Get your drivers, programers, and veteran drivers together to think this all out on paper before you acutally make anything. It should feel perfecly natural to the drivers.

Then, when you do make anything, make it robust! The board will get dropped!

-Andy A.