Re: Lots of Electrical Questions
 

I believe the 883s are good for any drill motors that aren't last year's or this year's, so you should be fine...

Re: Lots of Electrical Questions
 

We can break things down into to larger categories, analog and digital. There are certain components on the robot that are one or the other. Basically, an analog signal is going to be anything from 0-254 giving a variable output. This is what you want to use on anything relating to a drive motor or in general any motor whose value needs to change. Then we have components that are digital. Now, digital components are either on or off.

1)You have this speed controllers (black box thing with a fan on top of it)-
Now what this does is offer an analog signal to your component in order to get it moving at a variable speed. Case and point, you want to use this on a drive motor(s) in order to get varying speed.

2) You hvae a spike (the smaller unit with four "prongs" sticking out of it)-
This is offers the digital signal to devices that run off of this. This means that it is outputting either a 0 or 1 either on or off. So, you would hook this up to a pneumatic which would give the initial on/off signal.

Now essentially everything you have will go through the breaker panel. This is to protect your electronic devices. Why? Well, if for some reason a certain device begins to pull more current (amperage) than it can handle, the fuse/breaker will "blow" and will protect the device from burning up. Now here, we use the auto-resetting breakers (black with two thick prongs coming out the bottom). These are much better than a regular fuse. With a fuse, too many amps are being pulled and the metal inside breaks and no more electricity is sent through, however, that device will no longer work. Then we have the auto reset breakers which, if too much current is pulled, will "trip" or cut the electricity going to the device and then a few seconds later, will re-allow electricity to flow, so long as that amperage is not being pulled.
Drop me a message on here and I will email/send you the pdf file of the powerpoint presentation I used during the preseason with our students. It discusses many analog and digital sensors, as well as PWM's, victors, spikes, the RC/OI etc.

If you have any other questions....feel free to post them.

Re: Lots of Electrical Questions
 

It seems like you're a little unclear on the meaning of the power diagram. The big power diagram shows all the pure power connections of the robot. These are large gauge wires that transmit electricity from the battery to the motors.

Seperate but related, are the control connections. Victor 883s have 3 wire PWM cables connected to them that you connect to PWM headers (pins) on the robot RC. This is how the RC gets instructions to the Victor to control the speed of the motor. Spikes work similarly, but go to a seperate set of headers.

The best way to find out about this is to go to www.innovationfirst.com and look at all their white papers and documentation about victors and spikes.

Re: Lots of Electrical Questions
 

Don't mind me. I need to read more carefully in the future.

Matt