[ChrisA]

heres something to chew on before you come check out our custom circuit board (stang sense aka current sensing board)....

our drivers use a brand new color palm pilot (donated by palm) which we have hooked to the dashboard port on the oi (operator interface). we use this to display our data from stang sense and on another screen we have it printing out raw values for our joysticks and for our potentiometers which we use on our crab. while the raw data isnt too impressive (though its quite useful when we need to calibrate our pots) the color 'bar graphs' we use to display our stang sense data. as our drive motors draw more current the bars will grow larger and change from their 'happy' state of green to yellow then to orange and if we seem to be drawing way more current than we should be well see a nice red pigment and the bar will grow to full length (all the way across the screen). as of this moment we dont use any software as such to lower our current draw when it gets too high. if for some reason we start having a problem with accessive current draw we can potentially automatically lower the current with software so that we never stall (wouldnt that be cool). at this moment its up to our driver to glance at the palm every once in awhile to make sure hes not staying in the red for long periods of time.

well this is all great but you might be wondering why this is really useful to have a device showing us our current draw even if we cant really stop it unless our driver notices it and reacts to it. after matches we download the data to a laptop and watch it in close-to-realtime playback. having a video of the match playing next to the laptop we can watch for peaks and see what we are doing that is causing our motors to draw so much current. from that we can make changes in software as necessary so that current draw is minimal.

hopefully soon we will be using this data to theoretically stop the circuit breaker from ever tripping and also prevent any motors from stalling.

our team would be glad to use stang sense junior (our model version of the current sensing board) to look at current draw on other teams robots. in fact we got quite excited when we were allowed to use stang sense junior to current sense team 217 thunder chickens robot. if anyone is having problems with current draw they can feel free to talk to us.

i encourage anyone who is interested in learning more to come see us in the pits during motorola midwest regional or at nationals.