[dtengineering]

Our IR remote worked GREAT! For changing TV channels, at least.

If you wanted it to work on the robot you needed something other than the IR board. Although IR board reprogramming was availble on Thursday at Oregon, our board cut out at some point between the end of re-programming and the beginning of competition.

It probably wouldn't have made much difference. A simple "drive forward" command was enough to pick up four points, and a simple timed loop almost got us around the corner on the first try.

Our most effective use of auto mode was in the quarters when (after getting blown out in the first match by two really good auto-bots) we just moved forward about four feet using a timed loop and blocked their path. Hardly brilliant, but it was effective. We should have finished off with a quick sprint across the four point line, now that I think of it.

But hybrid mode has possibilities, and I think it should be not too difficult to completely bypass the IR board and hook a Vishay or PNA4602M style receiver up to the RC and read the IR transmissions directly. We've been doing it for years with PIC 16f627 and 16f84 chips on mini-sumo robots that we build, but we use PIC Basic Pro, which has some very efficient commands for doing that kind of stuff and only use the Sony IR protocol. We'll need to put together some good C programmers to come up with a reliable and simple way of doing it on the RC.

Jason