Tracking beacon without servo

[Biff]

Q: Are servos treated as electronics (in which case we can have an unlimited number of them) or are they treated as motors (in which case we are limited to 2)?

A: They are treated as motors so the 2 servos provided in the kit are the only 2 allowed on the robot. Teams that wish to obtain spares (Hitec servo HS-311 or HS-322) may purchase them from Tower Hobbies at: http://www.towerhobbies.com We previously answered Electronics. This is incorrect.

[Rickertsen2]

Unless you either want to rotate the robot and or have lots of sensors and be slow, there is no way to do this without motors. My point was to only use one motor and do things really fast. Or if you wnat to be really elaborate, you could use the above setup combined with a giant spring pretensioned before the match, that unwinds through a greartrain and roatates the mirror or sensor during the 15 secs.

Btw, the reason i mentioned using a mirror is bc its hard to spin a sensor really fast with wires atached, without using slip rings(rotating electrical connectors) or other weird hard to find expensive parts.

[jerry w]

Originally Posted by Rickertsen2

Mount the sensors such the the "eye" end faces toward the ceiling. Above that you have a scannign mirror at a 45degree angle rapidly spun by one of the other motors, with an absolute position encoder for position feedback of the mirror. Tell me if i am crazy.

OK! you are crazy!

this is an excellect idea. part of the difficulty with the Kevin design for the sensor is that it uses 4 valuable inputs on the controller.

a single sensor looking at the mirror uses only a single input for the IR pulse and a single input for the encoder.
our team has only 2 inputs left, so this would solve our problem.
of course the software becomes more intense, since we would be sampling both beacons.

the enclosure for the mirror would act as the shield for stray reflections. it might look like a flying saucer, with an opening all the way round.

thanks for the good idea!
i guess its ok to be crazy.

Jerry w