Recently, I have really taken an interest into using custom circuit boards next year. I was wondering if anybody could point me in the right direction to find some info on this topic. I have looked at the plans for the motor monitor on this site (under the white papers section), and it makes some sense to me, but I really want to learn more about this sort of thing. Any help would be greatly appriciated.
You have to be a little more specific. Custom circuit boards can be designed to do almost anything from monitor current to full sensor and control. Our autonomous mode is handled with a custom circuit board. It takes input from a variety of sensors and the gyro. As long as the custom circuit does not talk directly to motors and motor control does not pass through the box, the possibilities are endless.
Team 30 had a custom electronics board that took wheel counts. We wanted to be a whole lot more powerful, but that fell through.
Did anybody use circuitry to take the gyro count? Our team gave up the gyro idea as a result of the difficulties of sampling the data predictably. We wanted to find some way to do it with analog circuitry, but (being that the team members working on electronics had only dabbled in digital circuitry and barely touched analog) we didn’t get anything working pre-competition.
If you got this working, information please!
- Kristi, Team 30
we sampled the gyro using just the RC and found results to be extremely precise and consistent.
Al are you guys planning on publishing any kind of paper on your autonomous and custom circuitry?
Our team did something similar to how you did autonomous and i would love to see how you guys did it. I kept meaning to stop by your pit but never found time.
Are you guys planning on attending IRI?
We will try to put together a nice technical writeup of how it all works. A good portion of the team worked very hard on it from day 1 and it all paid off bigtime this weekend. Our “sweeper” program that we ran in most of the elimination matches in the Archimedes finals and Championship finals was invaluable, taking out our opponent’s stacks and then following through to clean off what was left of the stack on the top of the ramp.
We’ll try to put something together that covers all 4 pieces of the system: our custom circuit, which determines the exact (X,Y,Orientation) position of our robot, the robot software, which takes this information and determines how to aim the wheels and what direction to run them, our Visual Basic program that allows us to design autonomous programs simply by clicking on a map of the field to tell the robot where to go, and finally our Palm at the driver’s station that shows a map of the field and draws the robot on it in real time while the match happens.
That is so awsome:)
I cant wait to read it!
Anything that you guys post on StangSense will raise the cumulative knowledge of the entire FIRST community. Since I first saw its operation at GLR I have been very impressed with the performance and execution. I can pretty safely predict that the Autonomous section of the game will not only be present next year but also play a larger role than this year. Many teams had encoders and sensors but I witnessed no other robot that had as much inteligence as to where it was at on the field as team 111. Congrats on the win, your alliance deserved it.