Auxiliary Lighting W/ Encoders

[The_Waffleing]

So one of the members of my team is currently working on the auxiliary board for our robot and he was talking to me about how he was going to have to use encoders for the LED indicators beings that their are so many LEDs that are being used on the board right now. The board that we are using is the Launchpad MSP430F5529 that came in the K.o.P last year and I know that that can be coded with Arduino (at least from what I remember last). My question to the community of Chief Delphi is if there is no way of programming the encoders via Labview, how would one go about bridging the connection between the code on the LaunchPad and the Labview project? Is there actually a way to program said encoders in Labview that I'm not aware of? Any input is much appreciated!

[aeastet]

I am not sure what you mean by LED and why they would have anything to do with encoders. Could you explain what you mean by LED? Are these lights that you are using on your robot?

There are encoder examples in LabVIEW. If you go to the help menu when LabVIEW is open you should be able to look up encoder examples. It will even show you how to hook them up to the RoboRio.

[The_Waffleing]

Originally Posted by aeastet

I am not sure what you mean by LED and why they would have anything to do with encoders. Could you explain what you mean by LED? Are these lights that you are using on your robot?

There are encoder examples in LabVIEW. If you go to the help menu when LabVIEW is open you should be able to look up encoder examples. It will even show you how to hook them up to the RoboRio.

I'm referring to Light Emitting Diodes. The reason why I'm using LEDs is for our auxiliary "joystick" and beings that the controller board is using a USB composite, I have to reference it as a joystick in Labview (at least from what I remember). The LEDs are not integrated to the robot itself, it is located on the secondary drivers control board. The LEDs are being used as indicators for certain tasks.

[aeastet]

Okay so if I am understanding you correctly you are telling me about software LED and not hardware LED's correct?

These software LED's should have nothing to do with Encoders unless you somehow use the encoder input to drive a light. There are encoder examples int he LabVIEW help file that should get you started with encoders. Generally encoders will have four wires. They will need to be connected to two DI on the RoboRio. There will be a +5VDC and 0VDC and two signal wires. Each Signal wire should go to a different DIO channel (i.e. DIO 0 and DIO 1). From there you will need to set them up in the begin file and then you need to read them in your code.

I hope this helps as I am really not understand exactly what you are trying to do. You should not need a launchpad or Arduino to get an encoder to work on your robot.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by The_Waffleing

beings that

You used that phrase twice now, could you please explain what it means?

[The_Waffleing]

Okay so allow me to re-phrase this in such a way where everyone here can hopefully understand. The situation is that our auxiliary board is using 15 LEDs as indicators. Mind you, these are physical LEDs that are being used on a controller board that is not connected to the robot but is connected through the computer and is used as a third joystick device through the driver station. The situation is that if one were to use the first option in the game-pad configuration tool there would only be 11 terminals for indicator lights. The question to those on Chief Delphi is this, Can we use an encoder on the controller to accommodate for the quantity of lights and if so how would one go about achieving that? Are there any other ways to accommodate the number of lights using the LaunchPad that I am unaware of?

[Alan Anderson]

I think you're talking about programming the Launchpad to act as a game controller, and you want to have more digital indicator outputs than it gives you. Right? So far as I can tell, the most it supports is 11.

I can't imagine how you are thinking an encoder might help. Connecting an input device won't bring any more outputs into existence.

You should probably consider using the Dashboard to provide some of the LEDs you want. Since you're apparently using LabVIEW, it shouldn't be difficult to create a new Dashboard project and add boolean indicators to the appropriate tab. Name them to match Smart Dashboard (Network Tables) variables and they'll be easily controlled by the robot.

[Richard100]

I think that when he says 'encoder', we're thinking something different than what the OP intends.

[Greg McKaskle]

I also think that "encoder" probably means either mux or micro controller. I'm not sure which. Neither of these sound like an easy way to go.

Alan's suggestion to put some/all LEDs on the screen is a good one.
Another option is to use more than one launchpad device.

Greg McKaskle