Driver's Controls

[Ian W.]

Well, we made a pretty simple control system.

2 joysticks, mostly out of MY (i love being a programmer/driver) preference. i feel that with 2 joysticks, i get a lot more control over the robot, even if it is a bit harder to drive. so, on one side, we have the two joysticks.

one the otherside, we have 5 switches. one of the switchs got screwed up when i soddered them (i think i burnt it out), but that doesn't matter, cause we only use four. Switch one controls our "Super-Dooper-Kick-Butt Treads". by flipping the toggle down, it sends a signal to pop out two pistons, which deploys the treads. switch two controls a third piston on the back, which does absolutly nothing. switch three makes the robot's orientation switch. basically, front becomes back, back becomes front. useful incase we want to start backwards, or if you just get confused when driving in reverse . switch four will manually override the compressor. we thought it sucked up too much juice, so if we needed more power, we flipped it off. of course, we never bothered to program a LED to say when there was full air, but that's a minor difficulty . if the treads need to go down, you hit that switch .

that's pretty much our control system. nothing fancy, in fact, it really kinda sucks (it's too heavy). but i designed it so i'm happy with it. it also gets the job done, so i'm not complaining. if you feel like seeing it, drop by, although it's nothing special.