Cool Control Boxes

[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.