Emergency Stop Button Required?
 

I saw a picture of a switch box with a big, red, emergency stop button in the middle. Reflecting on common sense, past experience in Robotic's classes, and more, it seems logical that an emergency stop button would be required. This particular box, i believe, was wired into the OI via a joystick-type connector, in an unused port. I was wondering if this emergency button (or similar feature) is required .
Thanks

FIRST provides an emergency stop button at your driver station which ties in directly to the competition port cable. So, you don't have to worry about making anything specifically for this...

Could you be a little clearer?

At the competitions, there is an emergency stop button in the player's station that the driver can push if, for some reason, something goes wrong. As far as having an E-stop button for your controls, if you're giving a demonstration and need to stop the robot, just pull the power going to the O/I or if it's tethered, pull the cable out. Our team has "the box". "The box" plugs into the power port on the O/I, and runs off of a small 12v battery. There's a switch on the box that, when pushed, cuts power to the O/I and shuts the robot off if something goes wrong. I'll see if I can get a picture of it up sometime soon.

I hope that helped!

- Katie

Needed or not, our electiction made us one of the most "bling bling" Emerghency stops buttons possible! LED's and all!!!:cool:

You can use the dongles which have been discussed on the board (just do a search for auto dongle or yellow dongle) or you can goto the innovation first website and they have plans for a dongle. I think it can be found in the whitepapers section.

Their plans include switches to enable multiple channels which is very useful when you demonstrating with multiple robots and they all need to be able to be on seperate channels since the default is 40.

My team got mad at me when we made the "Supar Dongle",as it was named, cuz i splurged and bought a nice big cool looking red button for the disable functions.

the box on IFI is very easy to build and i'd recommend every team have one. Its also helpful cuz it has the autono mode switch which is good for programmers to test their autono code.

Nothing quite like a big red button of doom, or shall i say emergency stop and it can prove to be very useful in the correct hands..

kudos to dwarf for the choice of button and design because you just cannot have a small emergency stop button regardless of what anyone says.

Anybody know where I could get a big red button? We want one for our control board, but haven't found one yet.

baka^ni...

but that big red button i bought almost ruined my driver tryout this year when it was put in the hands of college advisors with itchy trigger fingers!

arigato:rolleyes:

Supplier for Big Red Buttons
 

Graybar Electric Supply or almost any electrical distributor will have emergency stop pushbuttons. They are commonly used in industry on machine tools. However, most operators are momentary contact pushbuttons and you need a button with maintained contacts, that won't open when you release the button.

Specifically, you can ask for a Square D catalog #XB4BT42 Red Mushroom Head Push-Pull Emergency Stop Pushbutton Operator. The list price is $30. See link below...

Square D catalog #XB4BT42 Red Mushroom Head Push-Pull Emergency Stop Pushbutton Operator

810's Dongle
 

Here's a pic of the dongle I made this year:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/at...&postid=135152

The purpose of this was to help us during practice mode. You'll see there's a big red e-stop in the center, as well as a switch to switch between auto and manual mode. The purpose of this is to have something around to switch between auto and manual mode without turning the controller off, changing the team number, rebooting, etc. While I was doing this, I also said I might as well make an e-stop button incase something starts smoking.

This was made JUST FOR PRACTICE. At the competitions, FIRST gives big red buttons that you can press to disable your robot (and, of course, THEY toggle auto and manual mode).

If you want to make one, first look through the whitepapers for Joe Johnson's paper on how to make a yellow dongle. Then go here for the updated 2002 pinouts on the competition port. I didn't exactly follow either of those - Joe's didn't have a auto-mode option (auto was introduced this year) and the IFI one didn't have indicator LEDs. Naturally, I wanted the style points, so working with our electrical mentor, we figured out how to slap some led's, switches, and diodes together.

On a side note, the LEDs have to be powered by batteries because the controller doesn't give enough juice to power them on the +12 pin (atleast in tether mode it doesn't) - that's why we used the diodes. If you want the wiring diagram, lemme know... i'll find a copy of it, maybe make an updated whitepaper.

Also, the e-stop button is from Digikey... page 802 of the jan-apr 03 catalogue... part numbers Z1345-ND and Z1555-ND. Note that these was just the button and the e-stop label. The actual contact block (the mechanical part that does the switching) was another 5 bucks. I assume it was so relatively expensive because those are designed to handle a lot more current than was needed. So I just saved 5 bucks, found an old computer power push-button switch, and hotglued that to the button. Messy, but its hidden and it works, so thats 5 bucks in the pocket.
All together, it cost $10 - 10 bucks cheaper than Carl's switch. Actually, if you bought the full switch assembly from digikey along with the e-stop label, it would be only $15... still half as expensive as the other one. On the other hand, Digikey has that $10 surcharge if your order is under $25, so... bah, something.

Hope that helps

[edit]Don't know why the link shows up instead of the pictures... I'm using the IMG tags, but apparently Brandon disabled that option if it's CD that's hosting the image...

Re: 810's Dongle
 

IMG tag wont work in vBulletin if theres a '?' in the URL, to prevent abuse or something. (which explains why the listen-to graphics have /'s in them instead of a leading ?)

ahh, okay... I figured it was something because it wasn't a file persay, but rather served from the db.... nevermind... as long as it's not because you don't love us, brandon ;-)