Robots in hometown parades

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by Billfred

3) Think of how you're going to handle batteries. 1293 modified their robot to add a tray to hold an extra three or four--just disconnect the dead one, plug in the new one, and roll on. (This was in the days of the IFI controller, where connections were made in seconds rather than minutes.)

On that point, could you wire multiple batteries in parallel to increase the battery life?

[NickE]

If you're looking to modify an old robot for use in PR events and parades, I'd recommend the VEX Controller. It works great, is very simple and connects almost instantly. Furthermore, the controller is completely handheld and doesn't require any external power source (a big advantage for parades). There is potential for interference when using the crystals (we've only had issues with other VEX robots around using the same frequency), but these issues seem to be gone when using VEXnet which typically connects in ~10 seconds. Our t-shirt cannon Shockwave and 2009 robot Devastator, two of our popular PR robots are both running VEX controllers with very simple code.