High Powered Targeting light on amazon

[wilsonmw04]

I would strongly encourage everyone who uses a photon cannon to be able to turn it off in game. A spike works really well for this. As we went through the season, the flashlight got more and more scrutiny. Being able to tell the inspector that it was only active during alignment got us through more than one inspection. I was told if it was constantly on it would have been deemed "unsafe" and we would not pass inspection.

[IKE]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

I would strongly encourage everyone who uses a photon cannon to be able to turn it off in game. A spike works really well for this. As we went through the season, the flashlight got more and more scrutiny. Being able to tell the inspector that it was only active during alignment got us through more than one inspection. I was told if it was constantly on it would have been deemed "unsafe" and we would not pass inspection.

As I told a lot of teams, if another team or ref complains about you temporarily blinding them, then it will have to come off.

I have had to talk to a few teams about that complaint, and one where the light may have changed the outcome of a match in 2013 due to blinding an entire operators station. In that case, if the robot hung pointed towards the opposite alliance, its light would cause so much glare on the center drivers panel that you could not see through it. I also had complaints from a couple refs. This lead to me requesting the team turn it off for that event.
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In auto, some teams will use colored lights or a colored filter to cause a different color of light to be reflected from the retro-reflective tape on targets. This allows for them to more easily differentiate from the reflective light on the tape and potential background lights.

[ahartnet]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

I would strongly encourage everyone who uses a photon cannon to be able to turn it off in game. A spike works really well for this. As we went through the season, the flashlight got more and more scrutiny. Being able to tell the inspector that it was only active during alignment got us through more than one inspection. I was told if it was constantly on it would have been deemed "unsafe" and we would not pass inspection.

Anyone have a pike replacement? I haven't been able to find a place to purchase any.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by ahartnet

Anyone have a pike replacement? I haven't been able to find a place to purchase any.

Someone earlier mentioned the PCM but there is no direct replacement as of yet that I'm aware of.

I will also mention this widget:

http://www.ctr-electronics.com/gadge...er-module.html

Combined with this widget:

http://www.ctr-electronics.com/hro.html

Would make for a decent spike replacement. Keep in mind that for the price of those two you're getting 6 spikes, and they are a lot smaller and weigh less. Will require some coding though.

I am not making any statements as to how you have to wire that in to make it work per FRC rules though...

[ahartnet]

Thanks. I've seen the hero but hasn't considered looking at it to possibly replace the spike.

We used the pcm for our led ring light. I think they could do something like 500 ma split across all outputs.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by marshall

Someone earlier mentioned the PCM but there is no direct replacement as of yet that I'm aware of.

I will also mention this widget:

http://www.ctr-electronics.com/gadge...er-module.html

Combined with this widget:

http://www.ctr-electronics.com/hro.html

Would make for a decent spike replacement. Keep in mind that for the price of those two you're getting 6 spikes, and they are a lot smaller and weigh less. Will require some coding though.

I am not making any statements as to how you have to wire that in to make it work per FRC rules though...

whaaaaaaaaaaaaat? I don't understand.

Why not just drive the first device off of the roborio directly? It's just digital outputs driving it.

You would have to hack together a connection from roborio > Hero anyway, why not take a gadgeteer cable (which is the same as a talon encoder cable) cut one end off and put .1 connectors on it to hook to the digital out on roborio?

[marshall]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

whaaaaaaaaaaaaat? I don't understand.

Why not just drive the first device off of the roborio directly? It's just digital outputs driving it.

You would have to hack together a connection from roborio > Hero anyway, why not take a gadgeteer cable (which is the same as a talon encoder cable) cut one end off and put .1 connectors on it to hook to the digital out on roborio?

You could definitely do that too. Sorry, just didn't think about it. Much simpler too.

In fact, these breakouts might make it easier: http://www.ctr-electronics.com/breakoutmodule.html

[Breakaway3937]

We used these.

We modified the flashlight to skip the control board and just power the light. We lathed down the aluminum enclosure to fit what we wanted. Since this had a current draw that took us over the limit for the VRM. We had to run this off this relay controlled by the RIO.

We had some complaints about our light earlier in the season. So, as soon as the bot fired, it turn off its light and then the operator turned it on when he wanted. We couldn't just plug this into our RIO due to the high current draw. We just wanted to be perfectly safe!

[bobbysq]

Originally Posted by ahartnet

Anyone have a pike replacement? I haven't been able to find a place to purchase any.

You could attempt to buy or borrow one from another local team. They should be fairly common, given that they were the only way to do pneumatics before the PCM

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by bobbysq

You could attempt to buy or borrow one from another local team. They should be fairly common, given that they were the only way to do pneumatics before the PCM

That's not true. We had relay slots we could use out of the crio and all other control systems I have used going back to the radio based ifi systems +10 years ago.