Can anyone tell me what a "Yellow Dongal" is?

Posted by Bryan Duggan at 1/12/2001 8:42 AM EST

Student on team #68, Truck Town Terror, from Brandon High School & OSMTech and GM Truck.

Can anyone tell me what a “Yellow Dongal” is?

Posted by Peter Krumdieck at 1/12/2001 11:30 AM EST

Engineer on team #353, Pobots, from POB Central School District.

In Reply to: Can anyone tell me what a “Yellow Dongal” is?
Posted by Bryan Duggan on 1/12/2001 8:42 AM EST:

: Can anyone tell me what a “Yellow Dongal” is?

The yellow dongle is a home made connector for the COMPETITION port with a couple of switches on it to allow you to cople of things:

you can change the channel from 40 to either 4, 13 22, or 31.

you can disable the 'bot w/o turning any thing off. (VERY useful in an “emergency” situation during debugging) just like the pro’s do if you get DQ’d in the match.

Go to www.innovationfirst.com: chapter (section) 4.5 in the system manual will shed some light. You can figure it out from there.

Your best bet is to ask Joe Johnson directly. He’ll probably have a link.

-pete

Posted by Joe Johnson at 1/12/2001 12:56 PM EST

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

In Reply to: Can anyone tell me what a “Yellow Dongal” is?
Posted by Bryan Duggan on 1/12/2001 8:42 AM EST:

“Yellow Dongle” is the name of the device that we use to plug into the competition port of the Operator Interface that accomplishes 3 things (ours happens to have a yellow case – not needed but nice since it is very visible from a distance):

#1: It provides a means to disable your robot quickly

#2: It provides a visual indication of that your robot is enabled (it is the complement of the “disable” LED on the OI) and the dongle is attached properly (which is important for #3 below)

#3: It provides a means of accessing the channels other than channel 40 (3, 13, 22 and 31 as I recall, but don’t quote me). This is important if you want to have a little multi-robot practice without FIRST’s competition controllers.

I will post some pictures and a whitepaper on this topic this weekend (I hope).

I have the photos taken, I just need to fill in the text.

Sounds easy… …wish me luck.

Joe J.