Yellow Rotation Sensors ?
 

Quite a few robots at the championship were using small yellow plastic encapsulated sensors to read wheel rotation (presumably reflected light based). Who makes them and where do you get those and what are their interfacing (to the RC) requirements ?

Thanks

Re: Yellow Rotation Sensors ?
 

If you mean orange not yellow then they were Grayhill quadratrure encoders from Digikey. You can check out some code at www.kevin.org

Re: Yellow Rotation Sensors ?
 

No, I'm 99% certain they were yellow. They were not directly attached to any rotating part. I am sure they were using reflected light. If I remember properly, Busy Bee used them aimed against black and white disks attached to their wheels. I believe they could be installed at least 0.5" or more away from the wheel.

Re: Yellow Rotation Sensors ?
 

From the description, they're probably Banner proximity sensors. Try doing a search on QS18VN6LV, the part number.

-Kevin

Re: Yellow Rotation Sensors ?
 

On 364 we used some of the Banner sensors as limit switches for the arm. The sprockets were black and we put white tape on the spots we wanted to stop the arm. We thought the normal limit switches were slightly flimsy, and the banner sensors were fairly easy to mount, wire, and program.

Re: Yellow Rotation Sensors ?
 

Many teams are using the Banner light sensors from previous year's kits for wheel encoding. They work very well at "seeing" a light and dark alternating wheel. You can easily make an encoded wheel using a drawing program and a printer to make an insert for your own wheel design.

Re: Yellow Rotation Sensors ?
 

you can use the line tracking sensors from last years kit to read a disk. it makes you wheels run more uniformly when you can record wheel rotation rate.