Prelim Photon Cannon Test

[EricS-Team180]

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

No camera, just a light. 180 and 25 used these to great success (you know, World Champions and all) last year. No fancy equipment, just point a focused flashlight at the target. They're really using it more like a laser sight, but big enough that the dot can be seen when it's on the opposite field wall.

Nuttyman54 is dead on:

We tried out a number of Bulb and LED flashlights, that we picked up from Lowes and Home Depot....nothing fancy. We modified them to be powered from 12v-5v and 12v-3v dc to dc converters as needed. We started off with both an automatic vision targeting system (that coupled the web cam and the chassis motors through a PID loop) and the manual targeting of the driver with the flashlight. We had both systems active at the Orlando regional. The driver got so good with the photon cannon ( gotta give George Wallace the credt for that moniker) that he abandoned the auto-targeting. We kept the vision targeting for autonomous - through the practice rounds of the South Florida regional. But, after the driver and operator demonstrated that they could line up the autonomous shots without it, we moved the web cam from up top to down low near the floor. This allowed us to shorten the 'bot to meet the height requirements for balancing from either side of the field, and gave our coach a view of balls in the hard-to-see corners and under the bridges. The 'bot we brought to Championships remained in that configuration.

I find Brandon_L's comment interesting. During our testing, I found the LED ring, we had for the vision targeting, to be much more distracting, from the driver's station, than the photon cannon. Do you also find the light rings distracting?

We will be trying both schemes, again, this year, and we'll see which one proves most effective. Manual simplicity or automated complexity...you learn lessons from both.

Thanks,
Eric