I am with a pre-rookie team from Washington Illinois and our first robot is a T-shirt launcher bot. We have the standard electrical board with 4 talon controllers going to 4 motors. All is controlled by an Arduino with Robot Shield, hooked up to a digital sidecar. Our problem is that we need a way to hook up a solenoid to our power distributor but also have a button wired into the PWM ports of the sidecar to distribute 12V of power to solenoid valve when pressed. I have no idea what to do but I do know how to solder, any help is awesome!
You need another 12V source, since the outputs on the sidecar are only 5V. Unfortunately, the RobotOpen Control Shield doesn’t support relay outputs to run Spikes off of. Your best bet would be to get 12V straight from the PDB and run it through a switch (normally open) to the Solenoid.