Transmissions: General Info

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

Couldn't those be consolidated into one button that toggles?

Toggling buttons are often a very poor way to control something. If you don't have an immediately obvious indication of which state it's in, you might turn it off when you want to turn it on, or vice versa.

For several years, the TechnoKats "gear shift" control was a foot pedal that toggled between high and low gears. The drivers eventually decided that it would be better to use separate "go high" and "go low" buttons on a joystick.

[CENTURION]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Toggling buttons are often a very poor way to control something. If you don't have an immediately obvious indication of which state it's in, you might turn it off when you want to turn it on, or vice versa.

For several years, the TechnoKats "gear shift" control was a foot pedal that toggled between high and low gears. The drivers eventually decided that it would be better to use separate "go high" and "go low" buttons on a joystick.

That's a good point. Though couldn't you build an indicator light into the driver's station or control software?

I just build things, closest I ever got to the electronics and programming was building an electrical board So I admit, I'm a little out of my element here.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Toggling buttons are often a very poor way to control something. If you don't have an immediately obvious indication of which state it's in, you might turn it off when you want to turn it on, or vice versa.

Originally Posted by CENTURION

That's a good point. Though couldn't you build an indicator light into the driver's station or control software?

The drivers' attention isn't on the operator console, but an indicator light on the robot itself could work.

There's a light strip in the TechnoKats' shooter that indicates when the wheels are spinning and when they're up to speed. Our team programmers also put in some fancy software this year to flash the underglow LEDs for status feedback. So far, however, the LEDs haven't been installed.

[2B || !2B]

We don't intend to make any drive changes to this year's robot, but we saw a lot of 2 speed transmissions at the Chesapeake Regional and got curious.

To respond to CENTURION's question, we have two people controlling the robot. One person uses the gamepad controller, and the other person uses the custom control box to control climbing operations.

Thanks for sharing the transmission, who716!