Posted by Raul. [PICTURE: SAME | NEW | HELP]
Engineer on team #111, Wildstang, from Rolling Meadows & Wheeling HS and Motorola.
Posted on 11/3/2000 11:25 AM MST
In Reply to: Nate’s Laws of Speed Controller Calibration posted by Nate Smith on 11/3/2000 8:42 AM MST:
Point #3 that Nate makes is very important even if you are not calibrating the Speed controller. We noticed that the speed controller would not function if the system is started or reset while the trim is too far in one direction.
Raul
: : What I meant by modification was to recalibrate the speed controllers. My mistake. We began to recalibrate the speed controllers and ran into problems. The directions told us that when we completed a successful calibration, that the light would flash green. We followed the directions correctly and no green light. We eliminated most of the possibilities as to why this wouldn’t work and we are only left with the dashboard itself. Our engineer believes that there may be a bug in the dashboard. Did anyone else have problems with recalibrating the speed controllers? Is there possibly other reasons why the calibrations weren’t working?
: From the experiences that I’ve had, the calibration of the speed controllers can be a sensitive process…here’s a few things i’ve found that might help…
: 1. It may seem like a simple thing, but be sure that the calibration button is all the way in…I don’t have a speed controller in front of me to verify this, but if the button is in all the way, the lights shouldn’t come on when the joystick is at the limits.
: 2. It sometimes appears to help if you move the joystick in a complete range of motion(in this case, joysticks 1 and 2 all the way up, then down) several times before releasing the calibration button. That way, the speed controller has more information to work from when calibrating.
: 3. Verify that the trimmers on the joysticks are as close to center as possible. if they start out too far to one side, the speed controller will not see a wide enough range of movement to successfully calibrate.
: 4. Like you said, the light is supposed to flash green when the speed controller is successfully calibrated. So as with anything FIRST-related, if at first you don’t succeed, try , try again(and again, and again…)
: Of course, if all else fails, it MIGHT be a faulty speed controller…in which case, it’s time to call Joe…
: Nate