Cool Control Boxes

[Branden Ghena]

What is the control on the right? Is it a slide potentiometer? Where did you get it? How well did it respond? Sorry for the twenty questions.

[NickE]

Pink's control board from this year was pretty sick

Closed / Open

[Mike Nawrot]

Originally Posted by tawnos23

What is the control on the right? Is it a slide potentiometer? Where did you get it? How well did it respond? Sorry for the twenty questions.

The control on the right is the lift/roller control. We made it from scratch (I use "we" as a general term for mort. it was really just the programmers and electrical guys) using a regular rotary pot. It self-centered using an interesting spring/lever system (can't entirely describe it in concise terms. I'm also not entirely sure how it was made/obtained. I was busy building an end effector). The lever would raise and lower our lift, and control the direction and speed of the rollers when the button on the side was depressed. The three buttons next to it were the automatic heights: pick-up, hurdle, knock height. We didn't use those much. As for response.. From what our drivers said and the handful of times I operated the arm during systems checks, the controls responded perfectly fine. There were slight issues with the pot drifting towards the end of the season, but if I recall correctly, that was easily adjusted.

Hope that answers all your questions.

Some other interesting bits of information:
The joystick was originally USB, but we didn't feel like messing with the chicklet, so the electrical guys disassembled it and wired it to a regular game port. The four buttons on top of the joystick were wired in series to the power button on the laptop, so you could turn it on using the joystick. There are ports on the back for a keyboard OR mouse, charging, Ethernet, and OI power, along with access to the competition port on the OI.

The GUI was pretty awesome, but I don't know much of anything about it.

[Nica F.]

Ours (Team 4) was pretty simple, I made it myself. It's easy to do but at the same time really clean and nice looking.



Ours doesnt have lights or anything, but if you're looking to make something cool, clean and easy i can definitely tell you how we made ours. It was really lightweight too

For a simple design, we got a good amount of compliments

[UndergroundVoid]

Well the past year my team had a welded 2" diameter tube square with diamond plate. in retrospect not so light but as my friends said just add wheels and you could use it as a skate board.

But thinking about the future with the way how thing are going with the new control system combined with the compatibility of new game controllers and etc your going to see interfaces that take a respectively small area and have almost no weight. anything is possibly it all depends on what you want.

[Pavan Dave]

What do you mean by control box?

The OI or RC. Our team called all electrical stuff 'controls' and thus we refer to everything as Brain or OI. Control box means something completely different to me..

I think green and I think 2005 - [looking for picture]

BUT if you're thinking OI this is my favorite -

(the joysticks went inside)

[The Megan 2207]

We made ours out of 80/20. It folded up and had casters on the bottom. We also made a slide-out handle. We based our design off of a rolling suitcase.

Unfolded:


Folded:

[UndergroundVoid]

Wow Big image almost fills up my 24 inch screen please consider making it smaller for others.
Scratch that it is going over both my 24 inch and 14 inch monitors!

[Bomberofdoom]

If I can get a pic from the regional, i'll show you the coolest/ most awesome/amazing/etc. controller ever! I'm 99% sure you're gonna' say "wow/cool/sweet".

[R.C.]

Do you know what team has that cool control box?

[Cow Bell Solo]

Originally Posted by rc_cola1323

Do you know what team has that cool control box?

What control box, the one a couple posts up with the super huge picture is team 2207's

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by Bomberofdoom

If I can get a pic from the regional, i'll show you the coolest/ most awesome/amazing/etc. controller ever! I'm 99% sure you're gonna' say "wow/cool/sweet".

This one.

[Eldarion]

How about this one: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/img...6190d197_l.jpg

[IKE]

This was the first year for us using handheld controllers with the Chiclet (sp?). A couple of our team members made a Poly-Carb suitcase, and the controller and controllers were placed inside. They then threw on the traditional honeycomb and I think it looks pretty good.

Note, we learned the hard way to put velcro on the bottom of the controls. A high speed ram at nationals wiped out our controls for an entire match. NOT GOOD.

[typharn91]

ill try to get some pics to post of the oi i made last year its pretty cool its very stylish but the wire was a little not pretty because it was the first thing i made but it looks real nice and got a bunch of compliments at regionals and some at nationals