Quote:
Originally Posted by SeanFitz
As a driver, I've always used a simple control scheme with everything on one XBOX controller. I guess I just find it easier to use, and only me driving eliminates any communication problems that could come between having two drivers.
But I'm curious about teams that use other Driver Stations. How well do they work? Are there any communication problems between your drivers? How well do the custom driver stations with all the buttons work? Does anyone feel as though there is an advantage to a certain version versus another?
As a follow up, how to you guys control your robots? I.E. What controllers, arcade vs. tank vs. custom, stuff like that.
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Over the summer, we built a custom panel enclosure powered by an Arduino Leonardo; this provided a great way for students new to programming to work with basic electronics and simple C-style programming; because the Leonardo can also pretty easily implement a USB HID interface, this allowed us to build what looked to the PC like a real joystick. It just plugged into the Driver Station and worked right away.
Part of the exercise during the summer was to design a custom Arduino Shield which had the interface to 16 buttons, 4 potentiometers and a LCD display for debugging. The students enjoyed the process of unpacking the package from the factory in China w/the custom shields w/our team name on it that did just what we wanted, and soldering the shift registers/resistors and other components on the board - and each student got one to work with.
For our driver, in addition to a standard off-the-shelf 3D USB joystick for our mecanum drive, we added 4 dedicated buttons arranged in a circle for the driver to perform an "auto-rotate" to 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. To strafe in a straight line, the driver simply held down the "auto-rotate to 0 degrees" button while strafing. These buttons are the big arcade-style buttons they sell on Sparkfun for a few dollars each. That, in addition to our Field-centric drive system provided a lot of driving control.
Then for our "gizmo" operator, we dedicated 6 toggle switches for control of the pneumatic system. We initially thought of using push-buttons, but realized after some testing that a toggle switch was much more intuitive. The operator got good enough to manage multiple switches with a single hand.
[NOTE: we also learned that in autonomous mode the robot can receive the state of all the switches, we didn't know that before because we'd never tried toggle switches previously. That allowed us to do some creative modifications to the way the robot behaved in our autonomous programs.]
We also bought a big red LED-lit "FIRE" button from Sparkfun - but we didn't get a chance to use that this year.
Once the drivers realized they could move buttons and switches around wherever they wanted, it really encouraged some creativity and refinement that helped the driving team be very involved, efficient and reliable.
And a few very clever mentors figured out how to get the enclosure to fold up into a box shape w/the laptop nestled inside, so it was very easy to carry from the pits to the field.
Next year we want to add a rotary switch for the autonomous program selector, which should be more simple (and more reliable) than the "SendableChooser" in the Smart Dashboard they currently use to select their chosen autonomous program. Because there are some potentiometers to work with, we may put a camera pan/tilt servo control on the panel, or perhaps something that steers a turret, depending on the game.
Now we've built the groundwork and experience to be able to customize the panel for the different challenges we expect to face in the future.