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Infared transmitters around the field sending info to the robot maybe?

Maybe its the gamepiece hahah... that would catch us all off guard...

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Yes Kate is on the GDC, she works at FIRST and is one of our our heros at FIRST.

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Diversified Systems out of Indianapolis made the sensor boards (and populated the components onto the boards) for last year's Kit of Parts. The same guys who managed the build for those boards were judges at the Boilermaker Regional, the FRC Championships, and IRI.

It's great to see Diversified get more involved with FRC.

Andy B.

Re: pic: Game hint
 

water game.


... thought i'd get that out of the way....

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Look what i found on the Trossen Robotic's website http://www.trossenrobotics.com/store...-Remote.aspx:D

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In my opinion, the issue with IR in 2004 was that the transmitter needed to be built by hand from diodes, etc, and there wasn't enough incentive in the autonomous period to try to work with it. Don't forget, it was also the first year that teams had the PIC (vs the Basic Stamp), so they had to learn a new programming language as well.

Infrared as a technology could be well-done in FIRST, if it's well-supported and people have time to play with it. I think this just may be what FIRST is trying to do. If it's a DIFFERENT technology, then it very well could be FIRST's way of trying to provide us with some info ahead of time (once the site is active).

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It's showing an error.

See, FIRST must have a thing with killing our sleep... Because my brain is a bit too busy with speculation and designs to sleep now.

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If the IR-sensors are gonna b used for some sort of robot "ID" system (2 tell apart frend from foe) if the game was something like lazer tag (as suggested above) and to score/dock points based on who you hit..

just thinkin aloud here..

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I just hope FIRST is smart enough to stay away from actual TV IR codes if this is a field element. And/or that teams will stick with odd buttons on DVD remotes. Given the existence of the Ninja Remote and the TV-B-Gone and all.

Mostly I'm worried about the impact of field lighting on these. I've seen some remotes that were remarkably finicky about fluorescent lighting near the receivers and all.

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just a note on that. the field lights are not florescent there regular incandescent (AFAIK Halogens) but standard theater / stage lighting. i doubt it will interfere with these little guys

...forest

on a side note... i my be a good strategy to use a TV-B-Gone or something lol

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Remove the emoticon from the end of the address line and it works.
:D

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Considering:
Once its mode is set, a single 5V output is sent via its output pins. The RC has 5V inputs.

It accepts power in voltages in a range that includes the voltage that the robot runs at.

It would be difficult for teams to wire up a IR emitter that emits certain codes, but it would be easy(-er) for them to mount this on the robot and receive codes from more complicated hardware mounted on the field.

Dave's joke in Atlanta in 2006 before the Einstein matches.

Changing my earlier guess:
I now guess that this will be robot mounted, and will receive info about field status from a high-mounted (hence the angle upwards on the IR sensor) source, akin to the green light in 2006 and 2007. Since it has 4 modes, then we can assume the field will have some item (probably in autonomous mode) that can be in a state that is in exactly one of up to four states. Each competition will probably have a 'training unit' where you can take your robot to get its IR sensor trained to recognize the 4 IR codes for the field modes, similar to how you could get calibration RGB data for the camera.

But the arena lighting will often be florescent, regardless of the field lights.

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The first thing I think of when I see this is all the fun I had making Mindstorms RCXs talk to eachother.....

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yeah thats what i thought...

I'll guess anyway:

are we going to have to detect the different infared that will change the score value?

have fun programmers!