pic: Early Christmas!
 

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

sorry, wrong thread.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Any comments on how the setup went?

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Very cool, how do the Jags work? Must be pretty simple to set up based on how quick this is up. Do all the connectors feel nice and secure?

Also I hate to criticize, really, but how do you debug electrical problems? Seems a little messy.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Originally Posted by Richard McClellan
According to the Getting Started guide, it is recommended to have 1/2" of empty space on the left and right side of each Jaguar speed controller. If you were to mount two Jaguars with their sides adjacent to each other, can this 1/2" space overlap, or would you need a total of 1" of space in between the two?

Yes, the 1/2" space can overlap.


-This is a post from another thread I thought you might want to consider this. Congrats on being ahead of the curve.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

aww im so jealuoso, we havent gotten our system yet.:(

good job goats but, clean it up.:D

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Very quick and easy. Big thanks goes to More Robotics team 1714 for their advice on how to follow the manuals. It was a big help.

Bench testing took about an 2.5 hours and we did this setup in about an hour. Jags seam sweet on the bench. We didn't run it on carpet yet. That will be Saturday.

All the connectors worked fine. Wagos are easy to use.

No problem about the criticism This was quick and dirty just to see how it functioned. When we decide what operations to put on the robot for testing we will do a real installation.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Please do share their advice!

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If they said it once they said it a thousand times....

The manuals do not flow in a linear pattern. You must be very careful how you follow them or you will be chasing your tail.

Chapter one will point you to a specific section in chapter 5 and only that section. Then that section may point you somewhere else. You have to be real careful to go where you are pointed and then back.

I would suggest that before you receive your control system that you download the manual and read if very carefully and familiarize yourself with it. It will make the whole process easier.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Does anyone have advice on how we should label the wires? Is there a caveat that makes it necessary to do more than, say, "SC1-P13" (sidecar 1, port 13)? I haven't investigated the Labview code yet, so I don't know what the port nomeclature looks like in the code.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Personally, I would do two labels, "sc1-13" and what it corresponds to. This year our wires were labeled "pwm01" and "Left Drive" so we knew where to put it and what it was. Saved having to look it up.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

I agree that the 1714 presentation was EXCELLENT! It was very similar to their "webcast" which is archived here. In fact the NEOFRA site is a very good compilation of resources for the 2009 Control System.

I believe the webcast archive also has a link in the FIRST Beta Test forums.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Stu,

Having seen the presentation, I also think it was excellent....do they have the PPP posted yet?

See you in Tel Aviv!

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I have to say, not thrilled about the amount of size that these new electronics take up...

But hey, you take what you get, eh?

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OK....I'll bite. WHY do the manuals flow in this manner? Is it not possible to make them more "linear" for the betterment of all? If the info is complete but jumbled, can this not be corrected fairly easily?

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There are two uses of the manual, one is to get people up as quickly as possible, the other is to provide the information in a logical manner for reference. Since teams will only get up and running once, but may need to use it for reference many times, Sections 2-5 of the manual were optimized for the latter use case. Section 1 provides the pointers to the needed parts in sections 2-5, in order for everyone to get up and running.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

How do you get power to the router? When i looked at the istructions, it showed that it has to get connected to the power distribution board and the cRio. The only problem is that there is only one ethernet cable that came with the router and a power supply that has no use on a robot.
P.S. It would be nice for a picture of it.:confused:

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

You need to make the power cable for it. Cut off the transformer part of the cable that comes with it and put a wago connector on it. Pay attention to polarity. If I remember correctly, the wire with the stripe is positive.

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Thanks, that was one of the last things i have left to do on the controls to make it functional.:D

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"Holy S**t it's Christmas" was my reaction when we got the new electronics too, we got it running on a working bot ASAP... it was beautiful.

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I found something wierd. When the pneumatic bumper was plugged into the power distribution board and there wasn't any breaker, we were reading between 2-3 volts. When the breacker was plugged in we were reading the intended 12v. What i dont get is how we still got voltage without a breaker. Any Ideas?

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

There's obviously some leakage through the pneumatic breakout from the 9472 Digital Sourcing Module when the 12 volt power isn't connected. I don't have a copy of the breakout schematics handy, so I can't explain the current paths in detail.

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Im not really liking how much space all that is taking up..

Congrats on the working robot though!

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There's only one reason why the manuals could have possibly been written this way:

Assembly programmers.

Used to JMP'ing around all day, CMP'ing and MOV'ing data while dancing the PUSH and POP shuffle, they managed to write the manual to the new control system. Unfortunately for those not accustomed to the ways of lean and mean coding, reading the manual is like being stuck in the limbo of oh_no JMP oh_no.

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It's those hyperlink happy wiki editors!

The document would make better sense if it were able to hyperlink just to the isolated pertinent sections rather than cross-referring the reader into the middle of an entire chapter.

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There is ~100kOhms of leakage around the breaker on the PD. Your 2-3V isn't real, it will disappear as soon as any sort of load is applied.

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Thanks. I was just wondering thats all.

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We were running our benchtest, but we couldnt get tank drive. Everything else worked. Do i continue on with updating the Crio or is there something wrong?

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Nothing is wrong. The documentation is a little out of sync with the OTB software load.

Nothing to see here,...move along, move along...

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Thanks again.:D

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When installing the 2nd CD that came with the new controls(the one with windriver), we keep getting an error saying that we couldn't connect to the internet or it couldnt connect to windriver server. We do have internet access and anti-virus program was disabled. Any suggestions on what to do?

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

I had that and it seemed to be due to firewall settings.
I tried it again at home and my home network didn't have the same problem.

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I forget where I read this, but I remember reading that the WindRiver activation process wasn't "school computer network friendly". If you are using a (school) laptop, then I would recommend seeing if you can take it home and try activating it there where the firewall is likely to be less restrictive.

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Yeah, i'm using the school laptop so ill try it at home.

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You can find pics of 1501's installed controller at

http://huntingtonrobotics.org/photos/

simply click on the "2009 - cRIO Controller Testing" link on the left hand side... the wiring is a little messy, but hey...its prototyping at its finist (or somewhere close:rolleyes: )

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

nice job guys. Have you guys started experimenting with sensors?

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

we are playing with the gyro right now...the only problem is the bot is overcorrecting, but that error should be able to be accounted for in code.

the 10th pic (starting on first row counting from left to right, its located in the second row) is of the gyro which is mounted in silly putty.

Currently we are also working on autonomous, but the gyro will need to be fixed first...it turns too far and loses sight of the object its tracking

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

Pretty cool. Have you made progress with the camera? We are just starting to work on it so it would be nice for some tips.
P.S. I was wondering if you can use multiple cameras.

Re: pic: Early Christmas!
 

running multiple cameras has not even gone through our minds...yet:rolleyes: . Anyways though, the camera was pretty easy to use. The only problem we had was that we could not figure out how to get the color wheel set up. (For some reason that i dont know, i think our team did not use the provided dashboard:eek: ). I think the dashboard should have the color wheel set up though. If not, we had ended up just using the color wheel off a seperate program and copying over the color codes.
I don't think you guys will run into this problem though. Anyways though, it iwas a breeze to use after that whole incident was cleared up. We were in the shop today, and we did figure out why the bot was overturning when it was tracking colors. The camera was set to only 10 frames per second (which may be default, not positive though). Once we turned that up, and lowered the speed of the bot, it was working much better.

Hope that provides some troubleshooting help. (But hopefully you wont be needing any!)