The software mentor and a couple other members of my team were loading code onto the robot the other day and with some sequence of button presses and hitting the “download code button”, they accidentally managed to make the team color LED flasher start flashing a test pattern which included green.
I searched and found this thread from over a year ago: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42401&highlight=team+color+LED+control
I just wanted to know if there was a way to manually set the color of the team color flashers and if I could control whether they blink, how often, or if they’re solid. I was also wondering if there’s a white LED in the flasher as well.
Before anyone tells me this:
No, I don’t plan on messing with the colors during the competition. Yes, I am aware that the team flashers are controlled automatically during the competition.
It’s just that right now whenever we put the robot into disable mode, the flashers go solid red and I like blue or green better and it’s bugging me.
if your willing to modify a LED package you can control it from the digital outputs. (beware that you probably cannot use a modified one in competition) but i have hooked them up to my computer for a light show (really simple with the parralell port)
basically what you need to know is that the 5 wires are as follows
Black - Ground
Red - Control of Red LED (it will work on +5 to +12vdc, it basically turns on a transistor)
Orange - Power (+12vdc)
Blue - Control of Blue LED (it will work on +5 to +12vdc, it basically turns on a transistor)
Green - Control of Green LED (it will work on +5 to +12vdc, it basically turns on a transistor)
so basically leave the black and orange wires intact and then connect the red blue and green wires to digital outputs to turn the led on. (thats how i did it with my computer but i tapped into my computer’s power supply for the 12vdc and ground, the other wires i controlled with the parallel port)
let me know if you need help
also not all of the LED modules i have seen (past years included) have working greens but they all should have red and blue)
The LED alliance color (red vs. blue) follows the radio channel you are broadcasting on. Using a different channel (I think it’s 13 and 31) will get you blue at least.
The default channel 40 will blink both colors.
Thanks for all of the advice. I’ll try this out sometime in the next week. I might not be able to get to it for a couple days because we’re trying to reserve this next week for drive practice.
One of our mentors expressed concern that wiring the DI/O to the red/blue/green wires of the team flasher cable might fry a circuit in the RC. He said this would be even worse if the team flasher ports on the RC used a different ground than the DI/O ports.
We haven’t ever used the DI/O ports as outputs before so correct me if I’m wrong, but when you turn a DI/O output “on”, you’re applying +5V to the signal pin, correct? Does anyone know if connecting this to the team color lights (the red/blue/green wires) will draw more than the 7mA max for those pins as specified here?: http://www.ifirobotics.com/rc.shtml#Specifications
If not then I plan to hook a bench supply to the orange/black wires to provide 12V, and use the meter on a second power supply to see how much current is drawn while using it to apply +5v to the red/green/blue wires.
Will this work? I haven’t had any real experience working with electronics, so I’m not sure if I’m missing something here.
Competition LED’s to my knowledge can ONLY be controlled by the OI/RC / Arena Controller and is set by the channel you use whether in stand-a-lone (meaning at your school or where ever other then competition) or in competition use. I don’t think you can alter which LED’s you can use and how often they blink since they are used for IFI troubleshooting purposes as well as determining which side of the alliance your on.
There is a third LED (green) but it only flashes if you mistakenly dis-connect one of the joysticks w/o powering down the OI/RC - I kind of found this out through a friend stumbling across this kind of scenario. I believe this LED will also flash if the LED’s itself aren’t connected the right way but I’m not sure.
I would highly suggest contacting IFI before trying anything with the LED’s and the OI/RC b/c I don’t think this is something you can alter/change.