Another idea for future competitions

[archiver]

Posted by Joe Johnson at 04/12/2001 10:01 PM EST


Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.


In Reply to: More computational power needed
Posted by Chris Hibner on 04/12/2001 3:04 PM EST:



I really have come full circle on this issue.

I used to long for a more powerful language, but at
this point so many teams are totally overwhelmed by the
current system, I a very reluctant to give the newbies
anything more complex to deal with.

For the most part, my biggest complaint has to do with
trying to implement PID control with the relatively
limiting micro that we have available. My second &
third biggest complaints are that there is no easy
method to know wheel speed and motor current.

I think that all these could be fixed without major
overhaul of the current system.

As to PID control, I have had several thoughtful
conversations with Tony and Bob at Innovation First
about how to perhaps release a "PID control" flavor of
the Victor. This could address much of the arm control
issues for most teams.

As to current sensing and wheelspeed sensing, I have
proposed that FIRST make a class of chips available
(say the 74LS00 series or the 4000 CMOS series) as well
as passive stuff like resistors and caps and a certain
square inches of prototype board. With this stuff,
teams could make whatever sensor they liked. The
problem of how to get these sensor to the PBASIC
program can also be easily solved. I propose teams
could hook up another STAMP2 chip (perhaps mounted on a
standard Parallax prototype board) -- this STAMP2 chip
would communicate with the Innovation First STAMP2 chip
via the PROGRAMMING PORT -- look it up -- when not
programming the stamp2 chip, this port is available as
via Serin and Serout -- it would make debug statements
even less easy to use, but it would not require FIRST
or Innovation First to make a new controller. This
Auxillary STAMP2 could collect the data from these
custom sensor, perhaps do some processing and pass it
all along to the normal STAMP2.

Anyway, that is my proposal to get some more EE type
stuff into the FIRST program.

What do you folks think?

Joe J.

P.S. I would recommend that FIRST switch to the "P"
version of the STAMP2 as well as allowing us to use the
"P" flavor on the auxillary version. This "P" version
allows for some better time based stuff. It is not as
good as having "real" interrupts but it is a big step
ahead of the current "SX" flavor. Go to the
ParallaxInc.com web site for more info. if you are
interested.