Are you allowed to have an adruino on your driver station to control an led strip?
You would want to refer to the “operator console” section of the manual on this one.
Of course, refer to the rules to double check this and fill in details, but the general rule for the past several years is that actuators (that is, things which move, whether motor, solenoid, servo, or pneumatic) must receive direction pretty directly from the roboRIO*. Co-processors (e.g. vision processing), lights, sensors, and other CUSTOM CIRCUITS can be controlled from the RIO or an external processor. An LED strip is considered a CUSTOM CIRCUIT under the rules, and can be controlled from an arduino or other processor.
- The reason is safety – FIRST wants to ensure that when the robot is “disabled”, all of the intentional motion is disabled.
Section 8.10 Operator Console in the manual doesn’t list anything that appears to prohibit it, so I think it would be allowed, as long as the LEDs don’t interfere with the robot and the Arduino doesn’t have the ability to communicate wirelessly. I would still ask on the Q&A just to be sure.
That’s what I was thinking. It doesn’t say you can’t use a micro controller to control the LED’s but that doesn’t mean you can.
I think he was referring to putting led strips on the operator console (drive station laptop).