Racing Wheels

[Ari423]

Originally Posted by mastachyra

Yeah, having the bigger wheel helps with precision. and having other buttons attached is useful. No need to reinvent the wheel! Pun intended!

I personally don't like the idea of the buttons' positions changing as the wheel rotates, but to each his (or her) own.

[jijiglobe]

Our team is strongly against using racing wheels to drive the robot, however I've talked to a couple teams (846 and 1538) that used racing wheels to drive their robots. From what they said, using that as a controller takes a bit of getting used to, especially if your driver is used to the simple tank layout. It's definitely worth playing out with different control schemes. Remember that just because you bought yourself a wheel doesn't mean you should necessarily use it for every single FRC game.

[tickspe15]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Someone should tell that to 16...

Or 971

[s_forbes]

I'm pretty convinced that an RC style controller is about as good as it gets. We did an experiment a few years ago where all the potential drivers tried to use the RC controller vs the traditional dual joystick approach, and everyone preferred the RC controller. It's hard to go back to tank drive after you use a wheel.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

I'm pretty convinced that an RC style controller is about as good as it gets. We did an experiment a few years ago where all the potential drivers tried to use the RC controller vs the traditional dual joystick approach, and everyone preferred the RC controller. It's hard to go back to tank drive after you use a wheel.

Any suggested models? I'm game to try it as they aren't terribly expensive but I'd like to cut up one that might work instead of just getting plastic shards all over the place for no reason.

[DanielPlotas]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

I'm pretty convinced that an RC style controller is about as good as it gets. We did an experiment a few years ago where all the potential drivers tried to use the RC controller vs the traditional dual joystick approach, and everyone preferred the RC controller. It's hard to go back to tank drive after you use a wheel.

148 won a championship in 2008 using an R/C controller like that one.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by tickspe15

Or 971

Or 254 and 60 (at least in the past, I know they've used 'em).

[s_forbes]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Any suggested models? I'm game to try it as they aren't terribly expensive but I'd like to cut up one that might work instead of just getting plastic shards all over the place for no reason.

The lower end Futaba controllers are what we've used in the past. They are all pretty similar; plastic housing with a potentiometer for the throttle and a potentiometer for the wheel. The ones used in the hobby go up in price as features are added, but you just need the housing and the throttle/steering sensors, so cheaper models tend to work ok. (watch out for really really cheap ones though... we had an absurdly inexpensive brand X USB one to play with that we got online, and the resolution for steering and throttle was extremely low. I think it used an IR sensor and a stepped gray-scale pattern on the throttle/steering wheel. It was very unpleasant to use.)

We've wired the pots into analog inputs for the OI in past years. Last year we took an approach that the Bit Buckets came up with, and wired the potentiometers into two of the joystick channels of a gutted logitech gamepad, so we had a USB steering RC controller.