Quote:
Originally posted by Mr. Ivey
I know my team is trying to turn the control board into something more productive than just a station to just control the movements of the robot. We are working on a dashboard program that will hopefully interact with our driver both visual and audio outputs. I was wondering if any other teams had ventured into this field, and how they faired in writing the Visual Basic with the PBasic for the dashboard program.
~Mr. Ivey
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Last year, our robot had a current measurement circuit that we used to both protect our breakers, and to sense motor stall on several motors. (we used it as a detect that we hit the mechanical stops)
Anways, the breaker protection was eventually drawin into the stamp code, but at first, our dashboard was used to place up bar graphs of important motor currents. These would not normally be looked at, and they would normally be green....but when the current got into the danger zone (overloaded) the bars would turn RED, and when the motor current stayed OVER CURRENT for a period of time (such that the breaker was going to go very soon) we flashed these red bars...so the drivers didn;t pay much attention until they saw the red flashing....
It worked well, but even that wasn't enough when the drivers were hot in a match....thats when we gave the STAMP the power to throttle back the motors itself when it sensed breaker failure coming on. (we simply powered back to 30% for the rest of the loop, and let the next loop re-adjust it however...the result was just the right power for a stalled motor that kept the breaker from overloading)
-Quentin
-Quentin