Dead Man Switch

Technical Electrical
1

i have always had all my teams have a dead man switch for autonomous testing. Switch ONLY cuts autonomous.

Anyone know if thats possible with the new system? i didnt see any autonomous pinouts on the d-sub 9.

thanks

2

Andrew,

The switch for autonomous is on your driver’s station.

Mike

3

I’m curious why you switch from autonomous to telop, rather then disabling the robot. That does come to the 9 pin d-sub, and seems much more appropriate.

4

Joe,

Was your question pointed at Andrew or me?

My team does use the disable switch on the D-sub. We also use the Auto/telop switch to change between modes.

Mike

5

i think you guys arnt understanding what im trying to do…

I know there are ways of stopping the robot like the disable dongle, but its that much faster to kill the autonomous mode during testing to simply let go of a switch. its just a extra precaution .

6

Wire the dead man switch to the dongle on the disable line…

We would all like to have autonomous and enable on the competition
port, for many uses, but if it is there it has not been documented.

At the cost of losing the warranty, one can open it up and trace
the wiring to the port to see what turns up.

Eugene

7

I believe Joe’s point is that you could make the same switch that would do Enable/Disable instead of Auto/Teleop.

8

There is a pin-out diagram for the disable dongle given. Wire up a new dongle with a simple serial cable and a button on the end. Since the robot is disabled without the dongle, it is most likely a “Open = Disabled” so a regular button would work fine with it.

3.1.7 Competition Port Pinouts
The competition port is used to enable / disable the robot. A “dongle” is provided in the Kit of Parts
for teams to use for this purpose when not in a competition. If teams need to make a replacement
dongle or need additional spare dongles, a team-constructed dongle can be fashioned by
connecting pins 8 and 9 of the competition port to a switch. NOTE: it is essential that the other
pins of the connector be left unconnected, as some of the other pins contain power and/or ground –

So you’ll have an in-hand disable button. You release the button, and the robot becomes disabled.