Hey this year we decided on a pretty cool way to make our control board. We hollowed out a piece of foam insulation and embedded all of the wires and systems into the board. The we wrapped it in duct tape to give it that nice homey look. The whole system is extremely light and strong. The cypress DIO board from last years KOP was hooked up to 8 DIO switches and we are running to Xbox 360 controllers.
Digital input OUTPUT switches? Wow, those are pretty cool
The board looks nice though. What are the switches used for? They can’t really do much since they’re all covered up. Are they just for settings and such?
Our operator console will have a total of 17 IO things; 4 analog inputs, 3 digital outputs, and 10 digital inputs. Unfortunately, nobody has gotten around to actually making the stupid thing.
Is attaching the classmate with velcro secure enough to carry it sideways do you think? Zipties give it a weird feel, but we might be able to use fabric.
Velcro Definitely is strong enough to hold the classmate; the whole thing feels very sturdy.
Right now the switches are set to do a variety of things:
Inverts the controls for first driver so that when the bot is driven backwards everything is in perspective, we are not sure if we will use this yet.
Inverts the controls for the shoulder motor.
Inverts the controls for the wrist motor.
Inverts the controls for the hand.
This switch tells the autonomous code whether it should head right or left at a “Y”.
This switch is very special. It is set up so that when it is toggled it decrements the target distance for autonomous. Every time the switch changes state the distance that the autonomous code drives forward is decreased by .1 feet.
This switch operates the same as 6, except it increments the target distance variable.
This switch changes the sensitivity of two joysticks to give fine control or coarse control.
If I had more switches I would use them, but at the time I was really tired of soldering and thought that eight was enough.
All of the switches have a corresponding display on the dashboard, as well as showing a user message in the FRC Driverstation. The code which operates the switches occurs in periodic tasks zones so it operates as long as our bot is connected. The switches are designed to be set during testing and left in position during the match. The whole system makes troubleshooting the robot much easier! Hope you like it!
