What was used before IFI?
 

hey, was thinkign bout something the other day.. what did FIRST use as there control system pre 2001? i was told that was the first year of the Innovation First system and, well.. im all curious now!

if you know or have any pics, lemmie know
~Pyro

Err I believe the IFI controller has been around longer than that.

I believe 2000 was the first year with the IFI system. Before that, I think some of the control system was made by Motorola. I never used it, though, so I can't tell you much about it. All I know is, we should be glad we have the IFI system now... I've not heard good things about the old controllers.

the old Motorola controllers were not that much different - in fact, the new ones are esentially clones (new and improved of course)

and there were no Victors back then, we used Tekin Rebel speed controllers (From Radio controlled cars).

Big difference was, you had to give the Motorola controllers BACK at the end of the season, or pay over a thousand dollars to keep them. For most teams, that meant you had to convert you bot to to use a 4 or 6 channel radio control system (from a model plane or car) if you wanted to keep your bot running.

BTW - if you go back to '97, the batteries used were two of the drill motor batteries (thats right! the little NiCad bats that fit in a cordless drill).

They had a capacity good for about 123 seconds :c)

Actually I have been wondering why First does not switch over to NiCads and NiMH batteries. Those have higher energy densities then a SLA battery and their voltages do not drop off as much.

History Lesson
 

http://www.pictars.com/042003/1992-2.JPG
http://www.pictars.com/042003/1992-3.JPG
http://www.pictars.com/042003/1992-10.JPG

Tethered robots!!!

All these pictures are from 1992.


:D

so thats why we can;t find out 99 control system! we assumed it was stolen, the team had a different advisors in 99 who retired shortly after so we didn';t know what happened with any of the electronics

On a side note: will the Victors take input from a standard RC car receiver? They are both PWM right?

It depends. IFI sells two models of the Victor. The one we use will only work with the Isaac control system. There is another type (frequently used in BB) that will work with a "standard" RC control system. Don't ask me why this is, but I do know this from having looked at the IFI online catalog.

Thanks. That's exactly what I wanted to know.

Yeah, if you go to www.ifirobotics.com you can find all the stuff IFI makes that we can't use... They have 24V Victors, ones that run on regular RC controllers, a super-Victor called the Thor 883 that can take 120 amps, and lots of other interesting stuff.

EDIT: Looking at it again, you just need a "PWM signal driver" to run a Victor off of standard RC controls. IFI sells them for $15.

Yeah I saw that. So with the PWM driver can you use any Victor with an RC receiver or only the 24V Victor?

PS. I so wish FIRST would upgrade to a 24 Volt system. Of course we would need all different motors. But with the kind of current some bots are drawing these days, it would be nice to have the higher voltage.

EDIT: And those Teken Rebels were great little speed controls. I don't know how well they held up in robots but they worked great in RC cars. Too bad Teken went out of business and their products are now almost forgotten.

A good question for this thread would be: What control systems etc did they have way back in 92 and the other early years?

We had the same control system from the year I started (97) till 99. I do not know when they started using it.

As Ken said, the IFI system is a clone of the old one, better, but still a clone. The old one had a Basic Stamp 2, which means it ran slower and didn't have the separate programming slots or scratchpad.

There were less PWM outputs (8 I think), and 8 relay outputs. The relays were built into the same board as the rest of the RC, as were the fuses for the relays. You had to take off the cover to change the fuses. Moving to the separate spike relays was a huge step.

They used Motorola Radio modems. They were many times less reliable then the current 900mhz ewaves.

The Tekin speed controllers were rated at 20amps max, I believe. We ran them at 20 amps continuous. It was not unheard of for them to go up in smoke in the middle of a match.

In 97, you did have the 2 drill motor batteries as your only power source. And they didn't last very long either. There were also a lot less motors then. Only 2 drills, and a window and a seat, I believe. FIRST handled the charging of the batteries. You would turn in your batteries, and they would hand you two fully charged ones. When they added the van door motors in '98, we really did need the bigger battery. They also raised the weight of the robot that year from 120 to 130 to account for the extra weight of the battery.

A few further refinements on what was said above.

You were never able to keep the old control system permanently. You could keep them after the season by putting down a deposit to FIRST. I think the deposit was around $1000 but you had to return them around October.

As for the Tekin Speed Controllers, it was not only not unsual for them to go up in smoke, it wasn't that unusual for them to literally catch fire during a match. I don't think anyone was upset when we got the InnovationFIRST Speed Controllers (which first appeared in 1999).

Other differences included the fact that the radio modems were hardcoded for a certain channel to operate on (it was at least not configurable via software) so that you hooked the equivalent of the operator interface (it was a much simpler box) to a radio modem that FIRST had supplied to the field. There also wasn't a competition port.

The final change was the fact that the additional $1000 for the first event you register for is for the control system. The price was bumped up in 2000 to account for the fact that we now get to keep the control system.

Matt

That bad, huh? So, the Victor 883 was used before the rest of the control system, then?

Everyone refers to the old controller as being Motorola but I don't think it was. As a Motorola team we had to resort to building one from reverse engineered plans that a team supplied at nationals one year. I think it was a commercially available industrial controller but I don't remember seeing a name on it. It was a bear to work on, mount, etc. and hard to trouble shoot but it worked and we all lived with it. A big sigh of relief when Innovation First was born and we started to get quality control systems and the ability to talk to team displays, competition port and dashboard.
Tekin speed contollers were the pits for big robots and every team had problems at one point or another. I remember a Midwest regional where Technokats killed a controller on the field during finals. When we could still call time outs, all the teams, in order, called their five minute time out so they could all help the Technokats get the controller changed. Then they went ahead and beat us in the last match.

Al,

You are right, the controllers were not motorolla. In fact, I beleive that someone told me that Eric Rasmussen at FIRST designed them. In any case, the Rnets were motorola, unless my memory is completely wrong.




In '99, we only used the Victors on the motors that required them, because we couldn't afford them on all. So we had 2 window motors that were still on the tekins. In our first match at nationals, we were allied with Gael Force. One of the Tekins broke part way through the match. This caused us to not get the 2x multiplier, and that was all we needed for a perfect score. Our driver didn't tell us anything was wrong though, until after our next match, which we lost because of the dead speed controller. Needless to say, between the 2nd and third matches, we replaced both Tekins with Victors. Doing the math afterwards, if we had gotten the perfect score, we would have moved from 30th overall to 17th. If we had won that second match, it would have put us into the top 16. Oh well.

I believe it was the Rnets from Motorola. I know something was from Motorola.

I remember there was a big deal that we were using the same system NASA used on the Mars Rovers. But NASA took the covers off thiers to save weight, thereby voiding the warranty. Motorola seemed very concerned about that, though how NASA would have returned the sets for a warranty repair is a little beyond me. I think Mr Lavery has the whole scoop on that little legend.

ChrisH

I never paid much attention to it at the time but my old team used to have an antique controller. It was big bulky and had a clear case compared to the slim black one we use now. I know the team spent good money on it at the time. I'm pretty sure that you could pay to keep them at the end of the season.

After looking at the '92 pics I thought it would be great if FIRST made some crazy rule next year about robot size. Imagine a match of 2ft cubed bots running around trying to move last years goals.

Again, you could pay a deposit to keep the controllers until October. I know it was just a deposit as I specifically remember packing up the controller to send back to FIRST. Now, I'm sure some teams just failed to return them and let FIRST keep the deposit money. I don't believe that's what FIRST intended however. And from your description of the controller, I think we're talking about the same thing.

I also think that the controllers were designed by FIRST or were at least a custom FIRST part. They didn't have any markings on them that would imply they were made by a manufacturer.

The radio modems were from Motorola. I remember having to replace the fuses on them several times (which voided the warranty if I remember correctly but I think we just put the covers back on and hoped no one noticed).

The InnovationFIRST speed controllers first appeared in 1999. We were required to use them on the drill and van door motors that year (am I missing any?). They were optional on all other movies. This was before the InnovationFIRST control system was born. I remember seeing InnovationFIRST for the first time and wondering about the name (and then realizing it was yet another bad pun on FIRST).

Matt

Does anyone know where to pick up the victors designed to be used with standard radio equipment?? I want to pick some up for some robotics projects.

http://www.ifirobotics.com is innovation first's site for non FIRST stuff. Look for the PWM signal driver on the page for any of the speed controllers

Thanks I was going insane trying to figure out why half of their products were missing. Btw in a innovation first add it says that the controllers we use have ten microprossers. Does that sound right??

In 98 and 99 (I believe) our first two years in First, the controller was housed in a clear-topped NEMA box, had 8 PWM outputs and eight Spike equivalents on board. There were 8 digital inputs and 8 analog inputs, all on one Dx25 connector. Most of the area of the board was relays, fuses (20 A spike-like and <2 A cylindrical ones) and power supplies (and their heat sinks). There was a BS2, which actually drove its own outputs, providing serial output and serial input.

The control unit actually had two power inputs, one for the electronics, and one for the relay output power. If the latter were not connected, you could not tell if the output were working. There were four blinken-lights that indicated power in the unit, that the radio was receiving data, and the program was running.

The radio system was a single channel, one way - no dashboard feedback as at present. It had a length of coax for between the radio and its antenna, and the stub antenna was placed on the robot with a through-bulkhead coax connector. There was an atenuator, to cut the range of the transmitter, I suppose, and we had to mount a right-angle connector on the transmitter, to avoid mechanical interference with the other connector.

Since we had to give the units back after the Nats, or after the summer if we left a deposit, we never could use them to tour local schools with last year's robot. I solved that by spending a few hundred to make a look-alike, work-alike clone, just before the change to the next system, of which we could not obtain an ordered, paid-for extra system until after that year's (2000?) kick-off.

Previous to that, photo-copied tracts, handed out at the Nats, told how, for example, to modify two radio-control units, each with 4 or 5 analog channels, so that they would provide some (real) analog and some (jury-rigged) relay (digital) outputs. It seems everybody wanted to control their robots in the off season, hence the "you-gotta-buy-it" policy.


Tekins had no fan, just a big heat sink, so external fans were provded. They would fail, and pass voltage back into the controller, ruining it and possibly other Tekins. One year, we were told to short out the current sensing resistor on the board, because some motors could blow it out, melting traces on the internal cct board, killing the control with no external indication.

Wow... I never thought I'd appreciate the IFI controllers so much. We should be happy we have them, and not the old control system, even if PBASIC is a little screwy at times...

For what it's worth...
 

I know that the IFI site states that you may need an interface device to drive a 12V Victor from a standard R/C receiver. However, before I knew that, I ran two different Victors (883 and 884) directly from the servo outputs of my Futaba R/C boat receiver. I was trying them with 9.6VDC drill motors, and the whole setup worked fine.

So I think whether you need a signal amp or not to drive the opto-isolators depends on the individual receivers.

Bruce C.

A few years back, before the IFI controllers were available and we still had to turn in the controls systems at the end of each season, some of the engineers at NASA Glenn Research Center and Team 120 designed a "build your own" version of the FIRST control system. This was done so teams could have something to use to run their robots during the off-season and summer-fall competitions. Their design was posted on one of their web pages for a while, but is no longer publicly available since their network was reconfigured. Fortunately, I made a copy of the page (sneaky me!;) ). You can see the plans here.

-dave

wow... i never thought that the Isaac32 system could be the saving grace for anything. the cumbersomeness of the whole thing seems balanced by the crappiness of the whole system that was used before.

ah. the world makes sense now. ;)

(still, i think progress should be made... shameless plug alert!!! :D)

*emphasis* mine, not Aonic's

A bit harsh, I would say. The current system does things unheard of in R/C, with feedback via lamps, and the dashboard port (Paradise by the dashboard port ? I would make any pun for laughs, but I won't do that ! :D). The previous system was also a cut above simple R/C, although it was a straight application of the various ic's used. It didn't have a lot of I/O, and its uP was slower than what we have now, but it's big drawback was that you got only one, and you had to give it back, when it was needed most - for trying new ideas out, learning PBASIC, or demonstrating your robot to local schools or sponsors.

The big advantage to either system is that there are blinkenlights to allow diagnosing faults quickly. It is so good now that IFI routinely claims any faults to be in your program, not their equipment.

In future, I can see folk using the electronics package to drive the Robot Controller directly, and putting all the computing in a favorite uP chip, but even then, the required competion controls will be reliably in place. Do that with your standard Futaba 6 analog channel R/C unit ! :P