Thread: what happens when you give a nonFIRSTER a robot?
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Unread 07-12-2005, 11:29
sciencenerd's Avatar
sciencenerd sciencenerd is offline
ooh, what does this button do?
AKA: Kyle
FRC #1318 (the IRS (Issaquah Robotics Society))
Team Role: Coach
  
Join Date: Jan 2005
Rookie Year: 2005
Location: Bellevue, Washington
Posts: 206
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Re: what happens when you give a nonFIRSTER a robot?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Denman
well, this year there is an easy solution. Make a custom port for the competition feed. it uses a standard port and 759 mounted a couple of switches and wired it into the port (don't ask me how, i don't have a clue ) and you can just emulate the pressure pad with a switch
or you can hit the robot reset on the oi and run whilst its resetting itself
Team 1318 made a box that did that in 2004, and used it again in 2005. It is a small grey box you just plug into one of the ports, with a switch for disable and a switch for autonomous mounted in it. Whenever, wherever and whoever is driving the robot, no matter how much (or how little) experience they had, we made sure to always have someone manning that switch with their finger over the disable button, just in case something went wrong.

That allows us to feel more safe with letting people not on the team drive the robot at promotions and things (although we always make sure that they have plenty of space, and always have someone there to advise them when they're doing something wrong).

We have only run into a problem with this setup one time. We were practicing with our robot in the hallways of our school once (they are open air and quite large, nearly as wide as the 2005 field if I remember it correctly). It was after the season, and we were trying to get some members of the team who hadn't been drivers to learn how to control the robot. Somehow, one member of our team got the robot shooting full speed towards a wall. Realizing his mistake, he quickly tried to pull back on the joystick and stop the robot, which probably would have worked. However, the person with the disable switch had seen the problem too and instinctively shut down the robot, so there was no way to slow it down! Luckily all that happened was that we got a little scuff mark on the corner of our chassis (our school's walls are painted concrete, you couldn't even notice the scratch on them).

The moral of this story: Only use the disable switch if the thing you want to stop hasn't started yet, or the driver tells you to. Sometimes it is easier for a (trained) driver to correct a problem than for you to just freeze it.

Edit: changed a few erroneous facts about our box - whoops
Last edited by sciencenerd : 07-12-2005 at 11:38.
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