Cool Control Boxes
 

I want to create a new control but all my ideas come back to a really heavy and not so good looking box. What were the coolest control boxes made this year, pics

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

I like 1538's, here. It matches their robot too, mainly in that it is rediculously awesome.

I'm not sure how big next year's opperator interface is going to be, though (has the final version of it been figured out yet?). You may not be able to get away with such a slim design.

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

1293 used this one in 2007 (and possibly 2008):



1293 has access to a lot of sheetmetal fabrication tools, so this was right up their alley. (The orange panel flipped up to reveal the OI.)

Ours (as in 1618's) was simpler for a lot of reasons (namely that we were short on time and unsure of our control needs), but I think it still looked pretty nice all things considered:



We have a table saw, a bandsaw, a chopsaw, a drill press, hand tools, and (because I was a USC student at the time) a plotter. We cut a piece of plywood and lexan to size, printed the board background (note the matching Capital Robotics logo--vector art is your friend), and put clear tape around the edges both to hold the lexan down and to keep us from catching an odd splinter. We could refine it further (something better for the edges would be nice, as would dressing up the bottom), but the style-to-effort factor was right for us this year.

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

148 had a great one this year

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

Ours was pretty sick this year. Throttle and Logitech Extreme 3d Pro joystick. And the fold out laptop in the center was used for diagnostics and stuff of the sort w/ a program and GUI made by the programmers. I don't think we really used it much though. But still..very cool haha

The lit one is from 2005

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

I don't have a picture of the whole board but team 910's centerpiece is the Weighted Companion Joystick. The board itself is also pretty cool so I'll have to get pictures. As you can see it is made of riveted aluminum bars with some lexan that we frosted covering it up.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/31109

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

Not much different from ours....

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

Here's ours:



Its really light and folds up into a nice little package that can be carried over the shoulder. Really comfortable to lug around.

All the wires fit into the box. This is the one from '07. We've perfected it a little since then.

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

A few more pics of MORT's control box from this year. As awesome as the laptop idea was, we never actually used it, and it wouldn't have been useful on the field at all. But the control box itself was very nice, with flush mounted charging and accessory ports on the back, visible OI, and the most seamless control mounting we've ever done. Also, the whole top is hinged for easy access to the electronics. Minus the archaic laptop, it would have been fairly light.

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

What is the control on the right? Is it a slide potentiometer? Where did you get it? How well did it respond? Sorry for the twenty questions. :D

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

Pink's control board from this year was pretty sick

Closed / Open

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

The control on the right is the lift/roller control. We made it from scratch (I use "we" as a general term for mort. it was really just the programmers and electrical guys) using a regular rotary pot. It self-centered using an interesting spring/lever system (can't entirely describe it in concise terms. I'm also not entirely sure how it was made/obtained. I was busy building an end effector). The lever would raise and lower our lift, and control the direction and speed of the rollers when the button on the side was depressed. The three buttons next to it were the automatic heights: pick-up, hurdle, knock height. We didn't use those much. As for response.. From what our drivers said and the handful of times I operated the arm during systems checks, the controls responded perfectly fine. There were slight issues with the pot drifting towards the end of the season, but if I recall correctly, that was easily adjusted.

Hope that answers all your questions.

Some other interesting bits of information:
The joystick was originally USB, but we didn't feel like messing with the chicklet, so the electrical guys disassembled it and wired it to a regular game port. The four buttons on top of the joystick were wired in series to the power button on the laptop, so you could turn it on using the joystick. There are ports on the back for a keyboard OR mouse, charging, Ethernet, and OI power, along with access to the competition port on the OI.

The GUI was pretty awesome, but I don't know much of anything about it.

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

Ours (Team 4) was pretty simple, I made it myself. It's easy to do but at the same time really clean and nice looking.



Ours doesnt have lights or anything, but if you're looking to make something cool, clean and easy i can definitely tell you how we made ours. It was really lightweight too :)

For a simple design, we got a good amount of compliments

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

Well the past year my team had a welded 2" diameter tube square with diamond plate. in retrospect not so light but as my friends said just add wheels and you could use it as a skate board.

But thinking about the future with the way how thing are going with the new control system combined with the compatibility of new game controllers and etc your going to see interfaces that take a respectively small area and have almost no weight. anything is possibly it all depends on what you want.

Re: Cool Control Boxes
 

What do you mean by control box?

The OI or RC. Our team called all electrical stuff 'controls' and thus we refer to everything as Brain or OI. Control box means something completely different to me..

I think green and I think 2005 - [looking for picture]

BUT if you're thinking OI this is my favorite -

(the joysticks went inside)