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Unread 26-05-2005, 19:49
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Sean Conway Sean Conway is offline
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FRC #0237 (Sie-H2o-Bots)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: May 2002
Rookie Year: 2002
Location: Watertown, CT
Posts: 16
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Re: FIRST Robotics for the Blind?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Elgin Clock
I know that our current lead electrical mentor has the folder packed with all the information about the system and he took it because we were cleaning the robotics closet and it was going to get thrown away, but I saved it for him.
Elgin and I are working on getting this info together for distribution, but in the meantime...

Here's how it worked:

We used a Honeywell magnetic sensor that could be configured to act as a compass. This was fed to a Z-World RCM-2020 microcontroller board, which was then fed to the robot controller. The Banner sensor was aimed at the carpet to sense the tape that marked the zones. This sensor was connected to the robot controller.

As the sensor detected tape (indicating a zone change), we would read our joystick inputs and compass heading to determine our movement direction.

All of this info was collected by a Visual Basic program on a laptop connected to the dashboard output of the Operator Interface. We'd use this info to provide audible feedback to the driver(entering zone 2, facing northeast, etc).

There was more...we tried to auto-track the goals and grab them, using the same feedback system to inform the driver of the current status.

There were problems, but we were pretty limited in 2002 as to suppliers, cost, and configuration, not to mention the PBASIC based RC (ugh)!!!

If anyone wants more info, feel free to contact me, I'll help if I can...
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