I’ve heard that the cypress board will not or cannot be used.
I’m looking for some guidance for my students on what to do for 2105.
Typically we’ve had the two joysticks connected directly to the driver’s PC and a cypress breakout board with 8-10 switches and 3 potentiometers.
Charlie Affel, FRC 423
https://www.estoprobotics.com/estore/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=33
Check out this product. We used it last year for our driver and operator controls and had no issues. The computer treats it like a regular joystick.
We have most often used the eStop Robotics CCI
That’s been tested and works with the new control system.
- 12 Digital inputs for switches and buttons
*]4 Analog inputs for potentiometers
We wired up our own board using a teensy microcontroller.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2666
I believe the same can be done with a Arduino Leonardo but I’m not 100% sure.
You can do this. We used an arduino mega last year. Just google ardunio HID device and you will find plenty of examples. Basically what it Ira is emulate a keyboard, so you have plenty of button options.
I’ve heard that we’re getting a new Cypress PSOC in the KoP this year. I wouldn’t necessarily give up on an easy solution until after getting the KoP!
Last year in FIRST Choice, Texas Instruments provided the Stellaris LaunchPad. There was also a companion booster pack and software load out available which would turn it into a USB HID gamepad: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Using_the_Stellaris_or_Tiva_C_Series_LaunchPad_in_the_FIRST_Robotics_Competition
The system ends up giving you a total of 22 digital inputs, and 8 analog. Our team used this quite successfully in our operator interface for 2014.
There will be an update to this solution for the 2015 season to add additional features for teams to use. If you are already familiar with the Stellaris LaunchPad solution, the new one will be trivial to migrate to. More information will be available soon.
You can load a “controller” program onto an Arduino Uno and laptops will recognize it as a native USB game controller. Specifically it will display as “UnoJoy” in the driver station UI.
Have you heard anything more about it being used for the driver station since your last post about it? http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=130955
We use a laptop with a touchscreen for robot controls.
We actually have a couple sitting in our shop right now, but we weren’t able to play with them very much due to added scope in FIRST’s official beta testing. At this point, I don’t know if/how well it will work with the driver station. We have plans next fall to use it to control a small, completely autonomous machine for our pit though!
Using a touch screen as a robot control device strikes me as being less inconvenient than using a mouse, but only slightly. You still need to take your attention off the robot in order to take an action. I believe physical switches and buttons and knobs are much more appropriate, because you can use them by feel rather than by sight.
I’ve played a bit with the 4200 prototype board. It doesn’t seem to support the USB component that would make it an easy to use board for the driver station. I have a PSoC5 board from SchmartBoards that works well as a 16 button + 2 analog ports. You could add more but I using up some of the pins with an LCD display.
I think you can use any board that you can make emulate a HID Joystick. I think that could be done with the old PSoC 3 kits.