Driver Station no longer has stop button?

Technical Control System
1

When we took a look at the 2012 driver station, we realized that there was no space for the stop light like last year. Does this mean that stop light is no longer required? If so, maybe they did it so we could use that port for the Kinect, although the 2011 classmate has 3 usb ports where 2 of which go to the hub.
2 for joysticks, 1 for usb drive, 1 for kinect.

I think the stop button is more important for us during the build season because the robot could do unexpected things. In the actual competition, they will have a stop button for us.

2

The laptop’s spacebar is now the estop button. The return key is the disable.

Greg McKaskle

3

The KOP has a red sticker with “STOP” in big black letters. I’m assuming you attach the sticker to whatever you designate as your stop button.

4

From manual, The Arena section 2.2.9:
“Emergency Stop (E-Stop) buttons for each Robot are located on the left side of each Player Station shelf.”

5

I suspect that the getting started manual or one of the other manuals has suggestions for where to place the sticker. And it will also call out the new DS changes including the estop button no longer being used.

Greg McKaskle

6

Beta tester here. The E-STOP sticker is intended for your spacebar.

It took our team a while to get used to hitting the enter key instead of the spacebar to disable…

7

The Estop buttons were a pain anyway. Disable is sufficient. We operated most of the time with the estop disabled. It was better to go through the extra steps on startup to disable it than to have to go through a reboot every time it was pressed.

I’m dissapointed that they made the spacebar perform an estop. It’s too easy to hit by accident.

8

Is there a way to change the stop key to some other keyboard key?

9

You’ll get used to it; we sure did. At first we made a lot of mistakes, but the pain of manually rebooting the robot again and again teaches one quickly :slight_smile:

Not that I know of. My guess is that the answer is no, especially because they want anyone, including FIRST Volunteers or safety inspectors, to be able to instantly emergency stop your machine while testing in the pits if it is being unsafe. Making the spacebar a standard “e-stop” button would facilitate this.