Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Andy Brockway
Could someone report on how this was resolved?
|
This was really handled badly from a communications point of view in my opinion.
Basically, just as the VEX manual states, you need 2 crystal sets to make this work.
Once you have 2 crystal sets and 2 receivers on the RC side, it works pretty well*.
The field had a phone cord type affair that plugged into the tether port on the transmitters. These allowed the folks running the field to enable/disable the robots. I am not sure if this actually caused the transmitters to turn off all motors (by sending 127 to each motor) or if they just turned off the transmitters -- I hope it is the second not the first, but I just don't know.
Actually, I hope that there is some unknown "disable" command that gets sent because once we are able to program these things I think anything less than that may give a sneaky programmer an advantage**.
Radio Shack sells crystal sets with 4 pairs (4 channels) for about $50.
Joe J.
*Just make sure you have BOTH transmitters ON and that both transmitters have good battery states BEFORE you turn on your RC -- very strange and potentially damaging stuff can happen if you don't have a strong signal of the right channel number already on when the recievers start looking for a signal, they can lock onto other weaker signals on other channels.
**A programmer could detect this type of disable (by looking for 127's on all channels for example) and then choose to keep doing whatever the driver was doing when it happened for an additional second or so. This would let the robot "coast" home after the bell or win that pushing match once the other guy is disabled or perhaps even keep slight power to the winch (to keep from falling for 10 seconds???)