Looking for a Driver Station
 

This year our team did not design a custom driver station to use with controlling our robot and the what not. However with our season coming to a close we would like to put together a driver station that could be adapted to use for any game.

Something that sounded really cool to me was foot switches. And just to check all of the teams with custom driver interfaces are using the cypress board?

Re: Looking for a Driver Station
 

There are other options.

This is one.

Ripping apart a joystick and connecting custom buttons and potentiometers to the appropriate locations is another option I know some teams have used to avoid some of the glitches the Cypress board has been known to have.

Re: Looking for a Driver Station
 

I had not seen that before. That device looks pretty neat. Maybe you can help me a little bit more too. Now as far as I understand that the cypress board MUST be programmed in C for it to work? Or does it already come with the needed firmware for it to work with the DS and act as DIO or Analogs

Re: Looking for a Driver Station
 

You have to flash firmware into the Cypress board, but otherwise, it's ready to go. You don't have to write code for it. Once you plug it in you can configure analog/digital IO with the driver station software.

Re: Looking for a Driver Station
 

Is the firmware available on the KOP website? If not where can I find it?

Re: Looking for a Driver Station
 

Beware of the Cypress, always code in back up code that can switch control to the Joysticks (or other control method of choice). Last year, we had an issue where our cypress board would randomly lose communication with the classmate. We were scrambling at competition to write code that would switch control over to the Joysticks, unfortunately we weren't able to get it to work while at competition.

This year we programmed in the back ups to be switched over from a button on the Joystick, that way the code did not have to search for the communication and we could test the code without waiting for it to break. This year, however, we never had to use the back-up system (which is a good thing I guess).

Re: Looking for a Driver Station
 

We used an E-Stop Robotics Custom Control Interface this year, and I can say that it's MUCH better than the Cypress Board that comes in the KOP. Very easy to wire into, and our Software recognized it just like it was another joystick - definitely worth the $40 or so dollars that it costs.

We remake our Control Board every year to two years, depending on how well the drivers like the previous control board and how well the board works with the game. If you're looking to make a board that'll work with any robot, I suggest making a two piece board that has two drive joysticks and the Classmate on one half, and assorted buttons and joysticks for auxiliary functions on the other half - that way you'll only have to change half of the board since most of the time drive configuration doesn't change (at least for us).

If you're looking for some good buttons that will hold up extremely well throughout a competition season or three, I'd suggest looking into arcade buttons from Suzo-Happ. Most of them are designed for something like 1 million cycles, so they'll hold up for quite a while, even if you like to press them a bit "aggressively". We've been using the same buttons for the past 3 seasons and haven't had one issue with them yet.

Re: Looking for a Driver Station
 

Are we limited to certain things on the driver station? Like can we only use buttons and potentiometers for the control interface? Or is there something that the cypress may have over the estop control interface in that sense