FRC Competition Control System

[Triscuit]

Does anyone have a Competition Control System that they have made for practice purposes with other teams that have the same functions as the control system used by the official in the regionals and championship? If so, would you be able to post directions on how to make one. Just to clarify, this is the system that connects up to the competition port on the operator interface. And i think I already know the answer to this, but is the Official Competition Control System that is used during the Regionals and the Championship available?

[EricH]

I'm pretty sure SCRRF has one. Not sure about plans.

As for the official one being available, I think the answer is, if you rent a field from FIRST for a post-season, the control system comes with it. I don't think the control system can be rented/purchased separately.

[KTorak]

If you rent a field in the off season, yes everything you need to run the event comes with the field.

[Josh Hambright]

Building your own competition controller can be done to some extent, granted you wont have all the same functionality of the IFI-Competition Controllers but you can get a limited alternative to it. Search around on the forums and you can find out how to change the team numbers to enable multiple channels so that you can use more then one un-tethered robot at a time in your own shop, and you can also construct a competition port dongle to enable and disable the robot and turn on autonomous modes. With this information and a little bit of elbow grease you can build something to turn on more then one robot and put them in autonomous mode together.

[Triscuit]

Yeah, I know how to change team numbers and such for untethered practice with other teams, I'm just curious if someone has made their own version of the competition system that controls all the robots on the field and has plans for it that they could share.

[tdlrali]

Well, it's pretty easy to wire a global disable/autonomous switch, but since the competition port protocol is proprietary, i don't think that channel switching is possible (other than the team-number-MSB trick).

[popo308]

Originally Posted by tdlrali

Well, it's pretty easy to wire a global disable/autonomous switch, but since the competition port protocol is proprietary, i don't think that channel switching is possible (other than the team-number-MSB trick).

no.. one of our previous mentors created one but we used the wrong power supply or something and it burnt up.... but it did everything from changing channels to disabling individual robots and even setting the team color led for red or blue alliance

[tdlrali]

That's pretty cool!

Too bad the rest of us will never figure out the protocol

[Triscuit]

Originally Posted by popo308

no.. one of our previous mentors created one but we used the wrong power supply or something and it burnt up.... but it did everything from changing channels to disabling individual robots and even setting the team color led for red or blue alliance

Can you or your team contact him? And do you guys still have that old system around? If so, maybe you could post a few photos of it and write what it looks like he to it to make it work.

[EricH]

One thing I remember about the 2006 SCRRF scoring/field control unit is that the whole thing ran with a laptop (visual display) and a VEX controller. I'm just not sure how. You still had to bring your own radio, though.