Quote:
Originally Posted by controls weenie
I wanted to share with you the reason I am asking about the PWM voltages. A few of the kids and I are designing a "PWM Extender" which will attach to the robot and inline with the PWM cable. The "PWM Extender" will be 2.5" x 1.5" PCB with a row of 8 LEDS to indicate the servo (or motor) command. This will allow our team to monitor (or debug) the robot health from in the stands. The "PWM Extender" is parasitic in that it will steal from the 6V supply (middle conductor) to power a ATMEGA88 uController to drive the LEDs as a function of the signal command. There is a 5V voltage regulator.
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This is definetly active. In addition this would be illegal in any previous year, as a motor controller is not allowed to connect to a custom circuit. It would be legal for you to make a seperate board and have the roboRIO communicate the values it's sending to the motor controllers to the seperate board over another communication method (I2C, SPI, CAN, serial, ethernet, etc).
Given how hard it is to see items on the robot during a match, a better option might be to have either the roboRIO log the data you want to it's internal flash or send the data to the dashboard. Both the LabVIEW dashboard and the SFX dashboard support logging by default.