pic: FRC1899 Control Board

[PaW]

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[connor.worley]

That's probably the coolest control system I've seen so far. Have you considered adding scale model driver stations and pegs?

[billbo911]

We did a similar controller this year as well. Although, we only controlled one axis. We made a scale model of our robot's arm geometry. We found that because the rotational axis moved greater than 270 deg. normal potentiometers would not cover the entire range of travel. So, we replaced the standard potentiometers with continuous rotation pots.





Here is the "secret sauce" we used for scaling.
The robot controller supplies +5vdc to an analog input device. The Cypress board only provides +3.6vdc.
So we simple multiplied the sampled voltage from the Cypress by (5/3.6)=1.389.

Here is the logic:
At one end of travel, both pots will give you 0vdc. At the other end, one will give you 5vdc and the other 3.6vdc. Both travel the exact same distance, so scaling is linear, just multiply the lower value by the scaling factor and now they are identical throughout the range of travel.

[nikeairmancurry]

Do you have video of this working? I'd love to see it!

[spacepenguine]

That's darn cool. And I thought we were clever with our pre-set positions...

[PaW]

Originally Posted by nikeairmancurry

Do you have video of this working? I'd love to see it!

I'll see if our media team has any footage from practice.

[davidalln]

This is absolutely fantastic. Please post a video!

[mahumnut]

absolutely amazing, nothin but props

[davepowers]

Awesome control board, this is deffinatly inspirational! I'll be by your pit in St.Louis to check it out!

[penguinfrk]

In this picture, you can see some magnets embedded into the wooden panel. There are small pieces of metal on the scale model. The magnets are our version of the presets, having 6 magnet locations of the rack and one for transport mode. There is a physical barrier (small block of wood) that denotes the ground for tube pickup. There are youtube links in that picture thread.


Autonomous mode is on when the arm is "tucked away" under the robot, making all of the pots at their most extreme values.

We had an excellent freshman operating the arm. Best part of it? He understands every bit of programming behind it.