Getting Started with Sensors

[rvolch]

Hey all!

I’m Renata from the SOTA Cyberdragons, Team 5700. This is only our team’s third year doing robotics, and this season we decided to make the switch from labVIEW to Java. We also have more than one person working on our robot code for the first time since the beginning of the team.

The extent of our experience with sensors has been using limit switches to stop a motor, which we plugged straight into our speed controllers. We are looking to gain a better understanding of more advanced sensors and their applications so we can use them in our robot this upcoming season. Our plan is so buy a few gyros, encoders, potentiometers, distance sensors, etc. and experiment with them to get an idea for how to integrate them into our next robot. We’re currently setting up a full electronics panel that we plan to wire up with speed controllers, pneumatics, and sensors which our programmers will use as a test platform. What sensors should we buy and practice with? What are good vendors to buy from? What are some good examples we could look at to get an idea of how teams use sensors? I can probably convince our team to budget a couple hundred dollars for this, but we’re pretty tight on funds.


We’re looking forward to your reply!

Renata Volchinskaya
Programming | SOTA Cyberdragons Robotics, Team 5700
sotacyberdragons@gmail.com