Hooking up a custom OI panel
 

We are planning a panel of switches for our pneumatics, but might have a problem. I found the pinout guide at http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/26381 and it looks like there are only 4 digital outputs; we are needing eight. We could hook up a second serial connector, but I was wondering if the analog outputs could be used. I'll admit I am mostly a programming guy, so this may be an incredibly stupid question.

I know the analog outputs have a range of 0-255. If we hooked up our on off switch to them, would they return 0 or 255, depending on the switch position, or would they fry our OI?

I'm hoping I can be lazy without killing anything.

Re: Hooking up a custom OI panel
 

If you look at the IFI OI guide on www.ifirobotics.com, they show the full pinouts of those ports.

There are on ports 3 and 4 I believe, passthroughs of the 4 buttons on port 1/2. Thusly if you werent using the buttons on your p1 and p2 joys, you could use the passthroughs. I would just be a little worried about accidentally activating them from p1 (ie. driver accidentally clicks the trigger on the drive joy) Though that is easily remedied through a simple "modification" to the joy.

Re: Hooking up a custom OI panel
 

Disclaimer: I have wired a custom OI panel before, but I am not an electronics expert.

I'm pretty sure you mean analog versus digital inputs if you're talking about the OI. As for using the analog inputs with on-off switches, there shouldn't be anything wrong with that, certainly not on the OI-frying level. If you hooked a potentiometer up to that same analog input, you'd just be varying the voltage between ground and +5 anyway, so doing it with a toggle switch is no different. I think it makes sense and would allow you to use only one cable.

The one caution I do have is that on the programming side, you should probably do input < 127 means 0, input >= 127 means 1, lest fluctuations in voltage cause the analog value to read a 1 or 2 instead of 0 (and likewise with the 255 end).

Re: Hooking up a custom OI panel
 

Thank you for your responses. I figured it might be a little to weird to program, but thank you for confirming that it would work.