Interfacing a Turnigy 9x 8ch receiver through the RoboRIO's PWM or DIO ports

[BlueVista]

So my team has asked me to figure out how to control last season's robot with a Turnigy 9x 8ch receiver for demoing purposes. The reason for this is last year one of our robots lost WiFi connectivity during one of our demos and kept driving forward until it pinned a person to a wall.

I was told I need to figure out how to use the RC receiver with the RoboRIO's PWM or DIO ports which I don't know very much about. Does anybody have any knowledge on how to do this?

[Bkeeneykid]

You'll just hook the receiver up to power, then plug in your motor controllers to the receiver. Assuming standard controls, I don't think you can get DIO to or from the receiver.

[otherguy]

The RC receiver will be used in place of the RoboRIO. You could technically have the RC receiver feed the to go top and then have the Rio drive all the motors, but you won't be able to utilize SOUp in or Labview without making modifications to remove the reliance on driverstation packets to keep everything enabled. This type of configuration isn't a small undertaking if you're here asking about how to plug things in.

Easiest way to wire it up will be to remove the Rio entirely.

Any motor controllers you were using will be driven by the PWM outputs on the RC receiver. After wiring them up you'll likely need to go through the calibration sequence on each motor controller while the RC receiver is powered (and you're walking the signal through its full range of input vals). If you don't know how to calibrate the motor controllers, Google or ask here. You need to let us know what type of controllers you're using.

It you had any sensors wired to the rio, or any pneumatic components, you're not going to be able to easily interface that with the RC controller. And for the most part any automation you may have programmed in to the too will not be replicated with the RC system.

Sent from my LGLS751 using Tapatalk

[ILAMtitan]

I assume that you are planning on removing the rio and just using the 9x controls manually?

All of the motor controllers and servos will work via the PWM outputs of the Turnigy RX module. For your main drive, just use a PWM spliter. You can use elevator and throttle (Y axis on both sticks) to control your drive motors. This makes using rudder and aileron (the x axis) for other functions tricky though. Something you can do to get around that is to setup differential steering in the radio mixes. I did this with one of our engineering bots early in the year, and it worked really well. Here's a video on how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNx9DHySD9A

That should get you a driving robot, and the other stick free for your mechanisms. There is a pretty big community around the 9x transmitter, and subsequently a lot of modifications you can make to it to improve it immensely. These are mostly for people flying aircraft, but some of it may be applicable if you google around.