Robot Lighting

[Kris Verdeyen]

Originally Posted by Meshbeard

I know team 118's robot had some nice lighting this year

Appreciated!

The lights were first put on the robot to look cool for the video, but it wasn't until we found an actual use for them that we were able to get the momentum to actually integrate them electrically.

We used an Arduino Uno to talk to this LED strip (mentioned above). The interface between the cRio and the arduino was some of the relay outputs on the sidecar. Specifically, there was one relay output (two bits) to run the lights for our co-op assist feature, and another for the fancy lights that fired when we picked up or shot a ball.

At championship, we added a switch to tell when the stinger was touching the ground, and wired that directly into the Arduino, which was simpler and makes a lot of sense, because we weren't doing anything else with that data.

Cheap additional processors like the Arduino hold a lot of promise for enhancing the possibilities for sensors on these robots that might have been limited by the number of inputs in a sidecar. I know that we explored some redundancy in our sensing this year, and that can exhaust the digital and analog input ports very quickly. A good off season project might be to explore interfacing something like the Ethernet Arduino with the cRio in order to fully exploit these possibilities.