Who used IR this year?

[Greg Young]

We had an IR system to get us to the 10 pt ball, with a sensor on one wheel as a backup distance counter. We didn't use it much because there were usually other things we needed to do during autonomous. I think we used that mode three times at Championships and it worked properly twice.

They keep telling us that IR will be important next year, so development of a good IR system is a big summer project this year. The sensors in the kit were designed for remote control of consumer electronics, so they are designed to convert any signal above the detection limit into digits for the TV. To deal with an environment where signal strength matters for finding the beacon rather than a reflection, we need an analog output from our detector.

Does anyone know of a detector that has the amplification, agc, and demodulation of the kit sensor but produces an analog output proportional to the strength of the IR input? I'd prefer to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Thanks,

Greg

[Gabe Salas Jr.]

We wanted to use the IR sensors on our robot for this year, to make autonomous a little bit easier. We got them to work on our robot, but there was a high percentage (about fifty percent) that the robot will not "see" the beacon. Maybe we were going too fast and the sensors did not see the beacon. Who knows, because we have worked five weeks on the programming to get the IR sensors to work, and ended up not using them.