How does it work?

[Ryan O]

At BAE regional, there was one team with a controller that had multiple dials, button, ect. They were the ones that won the award. I was wondering how they wired and programed it... I know they probally made it connect to a joystick port, with the dials corresponding to the y and x axises, but how would you do that? I thought it was so awesome that I would love to know how it worked.

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Ryan O

At BAE regional, there was one team with a controller that had multiple dials, button, ect. They were the ones that won the award. I was wondering how they wired and programed it... I know they probally made it connect to a joystick port, with the dials corresponding to the y and x axises, but how would you do that? I thought it was so awesome that I would love to know how it worked.

Depends on what you want it to do. But, each joystick port has three Analog inputs and four Digital inputs. See the schematic.

The digital inputs are for switches that are on or off, like a Fire button. The robot controller sees these as having a 1 or 0 value, and can be programmed to do something with that info.

The Analog inputs can be used for variable position information (like a joystick's movement), or switches (but, only one can be closed at a time!). The variable info is usually input via a mechanical thing like a potentiometer (variable resistor). It MUST be a 100k Ohm Linear pot, no other value or type will work right. For switches, you'd wire them up like the thumb wheel port shown in the schematic. From the Robot Controllers view, these values vary from 0 to 255 or so, and you'd use that to control something on the robot.

The only limits are your imagination. Team 1676 has a control board with a lot of switches, as well as joysticks - see the photo.

Good luck,
Don

[Rick TYler]

I just posted a pic of our RIO's console here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/23545?. All of these controls were routed through Port 3 on the OI. I am especially pleased that students figured out all the pin-outs and wired the connecters all by themselves (they stayed up to 3am at Nathan's house doing it one night). I was awestruck that everything worked on the first try.

Sharp observers of controls will note the AUTON knob. It really has nothing to do with autonomous. It was meant for another function that was rendered excess to requirements by last-second mentoring. It's a long story.

Other sharp observers will note the LED clusters that are clearly too large for the 10 milliamps available. The big LED's are powered by four "D" cells, controlled by DPDT switches. One side of the switch is wired to the OI, the other just turns the indicator lights on. This was a student innovation to allow us to have big, bright lights without violating the rules about the OI driving high-current devices.

Oh, yeah. Copper really shows fingerprints...

[ECarlson]

Our team (Team 116) used the boards from this thread to make it easier to connect switches and knobs to the OI.

Each joystick has 4 analog inputs, 4 digital inputs, and 4 other connections, which are either for LEDs or switches. All the joystick port wiring information is in the 2005 Reference Guide on the IFI web site OI page.

[Ryan O]

Thanks for the reponses, they are all very helpful. By next year we should be able to do alot more because of the ability to specialize our controls. Thanks alot!

[Greg Marra]

If you want to get really fancy, you can really take the difficulty of controlling your robot away from your drivers.