High Power Remote

Technical Control System
1

I dont know if this has been posted yet…

Has anybody come across a high-power universal remote?

Do they make such a thing?

Our IR board is mounted under Lexan which significantly reduces our range. Rather than change the position, we figure it would be easier to make the remote super high powered.

I saw that harmony remote and on the website it said it had high powered infrared LEDs, but I dont know whether that was just a sales pitch or if it is serious. (but that remote is realllly expensive:yikes: )

2

Our team has been working on this issue and we have tried many remotes. I went to the school yesterday and it seems that they have designed a huge array. They are telling me that it works but until we go to competition we won’t know as things are always different at the venues.

3

I have a harmony remote for my home (880), and I can’t say anything about the power, but it does have a very wide view, just a little less then 180 degrees.

4

not commercially, but 599 has an array of 33 leds :slight_smile:
We are just waiting to have a robot that wont keep having some sort of problem so that programming can get the program tweaked out.

5

Now is there any place where we could obtain schematics for a super awesome home-made remote? Possibly one we could tweak for high powerness?

6

see TSAL6100 on http://www.rentron.com/remote_control/IRLED.htm
(also available from www.digikey.com or .ca)

“…Radiant Intensity:
If = 100mA, Radiant Intensity = 40 min - 60 typ mW/sr
If = 1A, Radiant Intensity = 340 min - 500 typ mW/sr
Can handle a “Surge Forward Current” up to 1.5A.
TSAL6100 – +/- 10 degree angle of half intensity
Use For “Long-Range” IR Applications…”

With new batteries, my basic sony remote went 60 feet. Unsoldered detector and installed TSAL6100 (no changes to resistor etc) and range was beyond 100ft (ran out of space to test further).

Was originally going to build one of the below items and put in multiple high power IRs but doesn’t seem to be a need for it.
http://www.rentron.com/remote_control/TINY-IR2.htm

Your real issue is shielding the IR receiver from other remotes and directing it at the hybrid driver even when the robot turns.

7

Our team was having problems with ours. It would only go a few feet in hhybrid mode. Then we put aluminum foil around the reciever. It worked very well after that and we were able to go 3/4 of the way around before losing control.

8

we built a super high powered remote. ew just ran wires out of the actual remote from where the signal pulses are sent and put them in an array of six LED transmitters. In testing we got it to go over 150 feet (the hallway was not long enough!).

9

we took a standard remote and soldered 4 more high powered LEDs into it at different angles, to improve our range in both directions.

10

so at the regionals we could control our bot just past the first line but then we lost it. Now if we just put some more IR LEDs in series around the one that’s already in the remote would we be able to control it farther? is it legal?

i figure in Atlanta it would help if we can get lots o’ points in autonomous

thanks for all of the help :smiley:

11

put them in parallel

also, use ones with low current drain but high output (look around!) this will make it so you dont kill your batterys every match!

also, look at the front of the remote through a camera. (to check if they work and to check if your batterys are dead)

12

We swapped out the standard led and used 3 high power LEDs in a remote (but did not change the current limiting resistor due to time and risk limitations). We found that we could make it to the end of the field most times and a very few times turn across the end line. (our robot’s IR sensor turned to face the hybrid driver as the robot turned using the gyro and a servo). But in a few matches we (nor our alliance hybrid drivers) could not move more than a few feet from the starting point. Our best guess is the opponents IR transmitters IR light was powerful and it bounced off the plexiglass (or lexan) (non-hybrid) driver “window” to reflect into our robot IR sensor.

13

Anything past a 100 feet is not going to do you much good. An array
of 33 leds makes the beam very wide. The idea of looking at
the wall with ccd based camera is good since most see in the infrared.

Experiments with a glass partition shows that quite a lot of the infrared
beam glances off ( relfects ) so you don’t get a whole lot through the
plexiglass center ( and posts! ).

Cross talk between remotes is the big problem.