Green Camera Light Questions

[Naveen]

How should we power the lights? Can we connect them directly to the 12 volt or do we have to go through some other circuitry or get a seperate batteries.

[dtengineering]

Any half-decent 12V source should do... and the main robot battery is definitely a decent 12V source. Any car battery should also do the trick.

Just remember that the camera is neither required nor the only means to find the rack.... although it is undoubtedly an exceptionally cool means of finding the rack.

Jason

[Greg Marra]

You are going to want to put some sort of fuse or breaker in-between the battery and the light to prevent from shorting the battery directly (BAD). If you have any electrical parts lying around from previous years, just wire up a fuse block and connect the light to that.

[Daru]

I wired all the transformers to a small terminal block that we had laying around last year. I have a black and red wire stub that I hook to my "super 40 foot aligator clips of doom" Who says you can't run the robot and the light off the same battery?

The freshmen project for this saturday will be setting up the other two lights for us

[Blair Frank]

I hooked up a pair of transformers (for the lights) to a 9v wall-wart from Radioshack, and I did the same for the other pair and the fan. It isn't pretty (I used about a foot and a half of electrical tape) but it works great!

[Cody Carey]

Yup... We wired all of ours up to a 12v wall wart we had laying around, and it works just fine, You'll want to watch leaving it plugged in though

[Matt Krass]

I recommend a sufficient AC powered transformer in place of robot batteries, as they get low the lights dim and your tracking/calibration gets really faulty, and its hard to tell from across the room. With a solid power supply you can be sure your problems will never stem from incorrect lighting.

[ADZDEBLICK]

In the past we have used a power supply from a computer (one of the older ones with a push putton to turn it on.) It worked fine with no problems to speak of.

[Netherlander]

How does FIRST power the green lights on the field?

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by Netherlander

How does FIRST power the green lights on the field?

I dunno, but it has to be a steady supply, and I'm sure they've got it more than covered.

Anyway, we jimmied a couple of last year's batteries and it works fine. Though looking at previous posts, it might be beneficial to try the wall-wart idea. We're having trouble as it is just calibrating the thing, low batteries shouldn't add to the fun.

[bobmonkey836]

i haven't done much this year, but from fun last year... callibrating in a dark area might be good. unless you think having the robot "look" at ceiling lights is benificial...

[Daniel367]

Originally Posted by Netherlander

How does FIRST power the green lights on the field?

last year I saw on the practice field that they had a charger hooked up to a battery then a connection from the battery to the light all via Anderson connectors (two connectors attached to the battery)