Joysticks
 

Has anybody out there used anything besides the standard joysticks?

Fancy joysticks, throttles, rudders, wheel & pedals, gamepads, virtual gloves?

I'm thinking most gamers (and drivers) are more comfortable with a PS/2 type of game controller than they would be with joysticks.

In 2001 we used a steering wheel because we had articulation drive.

Tank Drive is the simplest solution, but it all depends on the game.

Here is one Team contraption from UTC, the person drove and manipulated. It is pretty cool, I don't know how it worked out.

http://www.rhodewarrior.org/2002/pic...source/69.html

One thing that requires is a serial connection, which fewer and fewer devices are being made with a serial connection. Most companies favor a USB connection for obvious reasons. You can however build a USB to serial converter, as 190 (I think) made their joystick work.

Where did you get the wheel from?

I know someone devised a glove once that you move your hand the robot moves.

team 60
 

Team 60 (Kingman) used a steering wheel to control their robot. They were at the Silicon Valley Regional, the Sothern California Regional and Nats. I don't know the specifics on it.

I think it was $30 or $40 at Wal Mart. It was ok, but if we had time we would have constructed a much better one that better suited our needs.

The Nifty Contraption the Kyle posted a picture of was from team
138 Souhegan High School.

As for how it worked out , I know that they were picked for the finals at UTC .

And Seeded 6th at Nats in the Curie Division, and Ended up as a Semi-finalist with 254, 151. So i would say that it worked out quite well.

Chris C
00-02 151
02-?? 229

I think I remember team 225- York HS- having some kind of VR system... didn't they win an award for that at Drexel last year?..

How exactly does one go about building such a usb-to-serial converter? I've found ways to convert a gameport joystick into the port on the RC, but nothing about usb-to-serial. If anyone has any info about this, it seems like a pretty cool thing to do.

Steering wheel
 

Hi, last year our team (60) tried to take some of the control prob.
we had in the past years by using a steering wheel,
we bypased ALL the interface prob. by gutting it and installing a
poteniomiter, then using the single joystick program.
remeber, simple counts!

I was looking at Circuit City the other day, and found really nice joysticks... they looked quite comfortable with a wrist rest on the actually joystick. They also had a large spring that seemed to give a great amount of controllability. Some of them also came with buttons, that would eliminate any control box needs for the operator.

I would appreciate any stories from anyone who has experienced use with other types of controls, that would persuade me or push me away from such a change this year on my control board.

Thanks!

You've got to be careful when buying joysticks. In the "old" days, joysticks had a maximum of 4 axes and 8 buttons. Nowadays, DirectX supports up to 8 axes and 32 buttons. The problem is, our control system only supports 4/4, and each axis/button needs its own pin on the connector. This is not the case with most joysticks anymore.

I'm currently working on an interface that would use a playstation controller to control the robot. If I could figure that one out, it would be so cool... Having a bit of trouble though...

i know Xbox uses a weird USB connection (microsoft redesigned it for some reason i do not know), so maybe PS2 is similar (hey, maybe it uses a PS/2 connection!)?

Nah. PSX (PS2 is a bit different since it has touch sensitivity...) is different. I already have the PC interface for the PSX controller working. I can get information from the controller and display it, now I just need a way to send it to the OI. I was thinking that I could use a transistor array to control the digital inputs for 1 or 2 ports but I don't know too much about using multiple power sources with transistors... I still need to figure that one out.