IR Seeker help?

[dtengineering]

Why not spend $15 and save yourself a lot of hassle?

http://www.robotshop.com/ca/producti...-02&lang=en-US

Be aware, however, that while these are excellent rangefinders, they aren't that good when trying to find the distance to diamond plate or other shiny surfaces... darn physics.

Jason

[PAR_WIG1350]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Why not spend $15 and save yourself a lot of hassle?

http://www.robotshop.com/ca/producti...-02&lang=en-US

Be aware, however, that while these are excellent rangefinders, they aren't that good when trying to find the distance to diamond plate or other shiny surfaces... darn physics.

Jason

$15 for the sensor, $40 more to interface it with the NXT, plus the analog inputs are only designed to read 0-3.3 volt signals (This might not be an issue, the rangefinders data sheet wouldn't load)

More importantly, It likely wouldn't be legal. It uses a non-visible light LED while only visible light LEDs are allowed in custom circuits <R5>c32. Also, the infrared LED could cause trouble if another robots IR seeker picks it up, which could be seen as a violation of <R5>d7. However, I am not capable of making an official ruling, the Q&A forum would be the place for that.

[kz2zx]

Chuck,

Dunno if you still need help. I just got to our IR seeker code, and like you, want the robot to stop when in the parking zones near the beacon.

In testing on my bench, and using the HTIRS2readACDir() call from Xander's library/driver, the maximum I've gotten for any one sector of the five (and the brightest sector DOES vary by about 5 lsb for the same distance when I rotate the head in place) is about 142. This is with the IR beacon the game will use, with a fresh 9v battery in it.

HOWEVER, the IR Seeker seems to return 0 if you're saturated/too close. That seems to be about 9-12 inches.

So, the kids and I are writing this to center on zone 8 (it's about 6 deg wide) and have mounted the seeker transversely to the roll axis of the robot (i.e. sideways to the direction of forward travel). There exists evidence on the web to explain why... anyway, we've got a event-loop-and-event-list pattern going with some statemachine-like code to implement a PD hunt/seek on the zone 8 - and slow down the drive motors down to 20 percent at over 130 mean brightness on zone 8 (mean between reply array 4th and 5th element). We stop after the sensor reports 0 after exceeding 130 (and presumably park in the parking zone).

We haven't scrimmaged yet (that's in early Jan here in AZ), and we'll be testing this algorithm this weekend. If you're not at your competition yet, hope it helps :/

[kz2zx]

well, the alg needs some fine tuning ('close' readings are about 180-190), and the seeker is really hard to use, IMO, over long distances, and I can't put my finger on why.

I think this would be a lot easier with two seeker heads.

[cosmo]

FTC question regarding IR. The field docs show a "master" and "slave" IR beacon set up on the schematic. We have beacons from last year "Get Over It", are these the same ones? We're just setting them up now and i want to make sure they haven't changes things up. Last year we got screwed over during a match when the battery on our beacon went too low and the beacon stopped broadcasting. Our bot couldn't find it and spent the auton going in a circle. We lost big points on that. TIA