I was looking at fms stuff and came across this:Educational Programs at AutomationDirect - Extra Keypads for GS3 Drive Training.
I was wondering what people thought. It would be cool to have that at home.
1 Like
It is a flex, but Automation Direct’s willingness to build stuff just for the flex is one of the things I love about them.
Would note that this is an older build–looks to date from 2014 given the game specific elements on the field. Component prices are higher now, wouldn’t be shocked if something on their BOM was end-of-life a decade later, and Open FMS appears to be a dead link. I’d assume a modern build would run Cheesy Arena instead.
But for someone wanting to serve up stack light realness in a situation where the official FMS was unavailable, I think you could do much worse!
4 Likes
I’m in the process of building an FMS using a Productivity 1000 PLC with Stride IO Link Master that is compatible with Cheesy Arena. The full system supporting VLAN isolation and full automated scoring will come in just shy of $7,000. I’ll be publishing a BOM and documenting the build.
8 Likes
It’s also worth mentioning. That the system originally linked above never came to fruition. The PC software to operate it doesn’t exist.
I am excited to see this. I will probably only be taking advantage of the driverstation setup you create, Hopefully including E and A Stops.
Hopefully a driver station setup will be way less 
I am very excited to see what you do!
Yes, E and A stops. I’m putting both in a single enclosure. I don’t have pics because I’m traveling this weekend.
Doing just a blue and red SCC, and A/E stops will be significantly cheaper. More so if you don’t care about secure VLAN isolation. I don’t have a $ amount off the top of my head but I’ll figure it out when I return.
1 Like
Ok thanks please keep us updated! 
Having a game with a ViewMarq panel would be really cool. The new driver station signs mostly already fill the need but still.
Here is what the E/A Stop looks like. Not shown is the M12 connector. I’m hoping to get a BOM for PLC and SCC posted soon.
This is the Stride IO Link master that is comparable to the AB Armor Blocks.
I don’t plan to have team stack lights as Cheesy Arena has no support for them. They use color of official team sign to indicate EStop status and connection.
I’m using a non modular stack light for the field stack light without a buzzer seen in the pic below of all the PLC cabinet components.
3 Likes
Are you wanting just the E / A Stop functionality or are you wanting the Managed switches too?
For a setup with 6 A/E Stops and no managed switches the cost would be about $2800.
You can further reduce that to about $1800 if someone where to write a software replacement for the PLC. Theoretically a simple program that translates the Ethernet/IP protocol of the Stride IO Link Masters to Modbus that conforms to Cheesy Arena wouldn’t be that difficult. I don’t think I’d do this if you are wanting automated scoring but if all you care about is the A / E stops then timing is less critical.
1 Like
I commend you I started looking into all of this and my head started spinning quickly. Thanks for keeping us updated and I am so excited to see how it goes.
1 Like
5431 usually hosts teams to practice on our field. We have plans to transition from a wood field to a metal field, so we thought of creating a FMS like setup to allow teams to quickly connect to their robots instead of having to borrow radios from us due to our district blocking certain signals, so have a few radios that are whitelisted, and for us to host even small scrimmages instead of having to each team have someone to press enable, everything can be controlled via the FMS and teams can have a event like experience
I think a lower end system with unmanaged switches (no vlan isolation) would work well in this scenario. I’d probably stick with the PLC as that gives you the field EStop and Stack Light for overall status of the field… and the fact that the software only PLC replacement doesn’t exist yet. 
Would an unmanaged switch allow teams to use whatever they have in their network tables? I thought you would need a managed switch for that?
We would like to have the E-Stop and A-Stop as we have seen many teams, including us, A-Stop our robot during auto, and since driver station doesn’t have a hotkey for A-Stop, practice mode doesn’t work for us
Yes, you only need managed switches if you want the security of knowing that the Team in Red 1 can’t change the IP address of their laptop and control the robot of Blue 1. The managed switch lets you prevent cross chatter between robots and DSs. For scrimmages and practices it isn’t really needed. NetworkTables and all other robot dashboards, video streams, etc will work with unmanaged switches.
Right, you’d have 2 SCCs (Stride IO Link Master) and 1 PLC Case to build to have the full A/E stop functionality. That setup would be around $2800 if you cloned my system.
1 Like
That’s not bad. I’ll add that to our list and we will keep an eye out for your BOM to potentially order everything we will need!
We will think about deciding between a unmanaged or managed switch, we most likely go for the managed option.
Thank you for all of this!
This is not quite true, due to mDNS. While the Rio has a team-unique name (with team number embedded), the same is not true for devices such as the Limelight or other coprocessors. If a team is expecting to just connect to “limelight.local”, that name may or may not be their device on an unmanaged network with no VLANs.
1 Like
That’s not quite true.
Anything besides the roboRIO that relies on mDNS will not work.
This setup will also require setting a static IP on your DS laptop.
One of the scarier phrases in networking… A practice field that breaks mDNS dependencies isn’t necessarily a bad thing in my mind.
I remember static IP driverstation being the official recommended config for several years around 2015-17, but more recently dhcp being recommended. Is requiring static ip ds actually a big downside?
(I found a used Cisco managed switch for less than $100 on ebay, planning to go with active VLANs for my field as long as the hardware I bought doesn’t have any eBay quality surprises for me.)
1 Like