Arduino Communication with Roborio

[darklink2458]

We have an arduino that runs the lights on our teams robot. We were wondering if there is a way to have the arduino react to commands made from the driver station. Thanks for any help you can provide.

[elijah1111]

what do you mean by the driver station commands? what you could do you could use a pwm line or dio from the roborio to the ardouino and read it there

[skidad68]

You can have the Driver Station talk to the roboRIO, and then have the roboRIO talk to the Arduino using the serial port or I2C.

[elijah1111]

Originally Posted by skidad68

You can have the Driver Station talk to the roboRIO, and then have the roboRIO talk to the Arduino using the serial port or I2C.

How complicated of lighting are we talking here? Would a simple PWM line or DIO not suffice. Just have the roborio output a PWM wave to the arduino to read then you could have your various lighting settings based on the PWM signals.

[elijah1111]

I would do something like this on arduino side, you could also have multiple pwm values for diffrent lights if you wanted it to.

float PWMsignal;//the signal from the roborio
void setup() {
  // put your setup code here, to run once:

PWMsignal=0;//intilizes signal

Serial.begin(9600);//syncs up serial output
}

void loop() {
  // put your main code here, to run repeatedly:
  PWMsignal=analogRead(3);//reads the pwm value for pin 3

  if(PWMsignal=42){//if its whatever pwm value you want turn pin 4 on
    digitalWrite(4,HIGH);
  }
  else{
    digitalWrite(4,LOW);
  }
Serial.println(PWMsignal);//outputs value to serial port
}

[euhlmann]

Originally Posted by elijah1111

float PWMsignal;
// ...
if(PWMsignal=42)
// ...

[RyanN]

Originally Posted by euhlmann

indeed

int PWMsignal;
// ...
if (PWMsignal == 42)
// ...

I would say that using that method would be highly susceptible to problems. You're relying on some undefined capacitance on the analog pin of the Arduino, cabling, and RoboRIO's PWM pins. You can use I2C, SPI, UART, or UDP/TCP if you get an Ethernet shield.

Another dead simple way would be to use some DIO as outputs. You can have 2^n modes where n is the number of outputs you use.

From Easy to Hard (my opinion of course):
DIO, UART, TCP/UDP, I2C