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Unread 20-03-2006, 20:31
devicenull devicenull is offline
Robot? We need a robot?
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Re: All teams need competition port sim

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy A.
A long cable and a clearly labeled and easy to actuate 'STOP/DISABLE' button is a huge benefit to safety. We've all been testing the robot and scrambled to disable it before something/someone gets damaged. It's also useful and comforting to have when demoing the robot, since this is typically when new drivers and the public try their hand at the controls. It's like the dual brake pedals on a drivers ed. car. This lets you stop the 'bot before things get out of control and lets you avoid a embarrassing and potentially dangerous situations where the robot goes flying off a stage (been there, done that!).
I saw a team at UTC, (maybe RAGE?) That apparently had the disable switch wired up like a dead man's switch.. you let go, robot got disabled. That seemed pretty cool. That also seems more useful for demo's.. make sure that a team member is at the controls before little kids come up.

I was debating getting a magnetic one for the robot.. have it plugged into a digital input, and set all PWM's to neutral, then throw the code into a "while (1) {}" loop so it couldn't go anywhere