New Robot Controllers

[MikeDubreuil]

Originally Posted by dddriveman

While talking to the innovation first guy at the championship event he said that they are going to switch to new robot controllers and operator interfaces that use digital controls. He said that they are aiming at something that will use like PS2 controllers. He said that they are going to have to use lots of code to filter out the sensativity of the sticks on the controllers. What do you think of this?

Here's my problem with switching to new controllers: the analog to digital conversion has to happen somewhere. It's currently very easy for teams to interface an analog sensor with the controller because A/D happens in the controller. We're definitely not loosing analog sensors.

If your rumor is true, we would have to use additional circuitry to do the analog to digital conversion outside the box . Then in software we would have to combine multiple digital inputs to create a binary value to represent the analog signal. I'm not against it, it would even give more options; but it would make things a little more difficult.

The robot controllers becomes a lot simpler this way. They could use only 1 pin for each input (since we share a common negative you really don't need a negative pin).

Perhaps IFI is creating external A/D modules for us, like how they moved the relays off the robot controler to the SPIKE?

EDIT: Unfortunately, this does mean that we would need 8 pins (2003) or 10 pins (2004) to represent a single analog value.... I'm not sure how easier this would be