How should we power the lights? Can we connect them directly to the 12 volt or do we have to go through some other circuitry or get a seperate batteries.
Any half-decent 12V source should do… and the main robot battery is definitely a decent 12V source. Any car battery should also do the trick.
Just remember that the camera is neither required nor the only means to find the rack… although it is undoubtedly an exceptionally cool means of finding the rack.
Jason
You are going to want to put some sort of fuse or breaker in-between the battery and the light to prevent from shorting the battery directly (BAD). If you have any electrical parts lying around from previous years, just wire up a fuse block and connect the light to that.
I wired all the transformers to a small terminal block that we had laying around last year. I have a black and red wire stub that I hook to my “super 40 foot aligator clips of doom” Who says you can’t run the robot and the light off the same battery?
The freshmen project for this saturday will be setting up the other two lights for us 
I hooked up a pair of transformers (for the lights) to a 9v wall-wart from Radioshack, and I did the same for the other pair and the fan. It isn’t pretty (I used about a foot and a half of electrical tape) but it works great!
Yup… We wired all of ours up to a 12v wall wart we had laying around, and it works just fine, You’ll want to watch leaving it plugged in though
I recommend a sufficient AC powered transformer in place of robot batteries, as they get low the lights dim and your tracking/calibration gets really faulty, and its hard to tell from across the room. With a solid power supply you can be sure your problems will never stem from incorrect lighting.
In the past we have used a power supply from a computer (one of the older ones with a push putton to turn it on.) It worked fine with no problems to speak of.
How does FIRST power the green lights on the field?
I dunno, but it has to be a steady supply, and I’m sure they’ve got it more than covered.
Anyway, we jimmied a couple of last year’s batteries and it works fine. Though looking at previous posts, it might be beneficial to try the wall-wart idea. We’re having trouble as it is just calibrating the thing, low batteries shouldn’t add to the fun.
i haven’t done much this year, but from fun last year… callibrating in a dark area might be good. unless you think having the robot “look” at ceiling lights is benificial…
Has anyone who used a 12V. AC adapter have any problems with the lights dimming out after about 4 minutes or so? My team has had this problem for the past two years now. We’ve checked our wire setup many times and we can’t find anything that could be causing the problem. We are running through a large terminal block and that may be the cause of the problem, but we are not sure. We haven’t gotten the chance to change it out yet. Also are there any teams who have florescent lights in their buildings? We have them and we cannot program very well because of the poor lighting. If you have this problem, how do/did you best get around it? We would really like to have a camera this year.
~Rabbit 222
did you look at the current load of each pair of cold cathode lights, and the available power from the wall wart?
We estimated about 3 amps per light box, the old computer PS I gave the team is rated 5 amps on the +12v output
Most 12v wall warts are rated for one amp or less.
I remember last year we had our camera hooked up to just one battery. After about 2 weeks of working with it, all of a sudden the camera just wouldn’t pick it up. After running some tests with it, we found that it was grossly out of focus. After much blaming of freshmen, we tried it out again. Still it wouldn’t pick up the light. After running more tests, we found that the battery was low, and the light wasn’t that perfect shade of green. :rolleyes: whoops
I think your problem with your light dimming after a few minutes is that you don’t have a sufficient supply of power. I would recommend at least a 1500mA power supply. Also, we have florescent lighting in our building, as I would suspect most teams have and we don’t have any problems. I’m thinking that your lights start off dim and just get dimmer, causing your camera to not see the light very well. We use one of our old 
ILLEGAL batteries and it works fine for about 4 hours without dimming, and then it takes about 2 hours to charge back up. You can purchase a 12V power regulator and put 2 batteries in series and it will give you a steady level of light, just make sure your voltage regulator can handle 30 volts. I say 30 volts because when you charge a battery, the voltage is above 12 volts, and 15 volts should be the maximum voltage your battery should ever get. Hopefully this helps…
Thanks RyanN. I will discuss this method of battery power with the electrical engineer and hopefully we will have much better results.
When I made the lights for my team’s practice feild I decided to put 2.1 mm plugs on the sides and use 12v 1a wall bricks to power them. They seem to work fine and i haven’t experinced any problems. Also I placed two 12v fans similar to the ones on the Victor speed controlers so that there was a constant air flow through the box to keep the cathodes cool.
last year I saw on the practice field that they had a charger hooked up to a battery then a connection from the battery to the light all via Anderson connectors (two connectors attached to the battery)
Each of the lighting kits says it takes 0.7A. Multiply by 4, and that’s 2.8 A. We also add two 80mA fans, for a total of 2960 mA. I’d encourage you to have at least a 3A power supply. I’ve never seen any wall-warts that large, but you can use a computer power supply, or similar. Or just use the old batteries.