Hey everyone, hope all is going well during the 2015 build season. One thing my team wanted to do last year but didn’t get the chance to was to have some “interactive” LEDs (like the ones in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-1yN0lGJLM ). I was wondering how teams program/connect the LED’s so they “interact” with the robot. I imagine this is achieved through an arduino which my team luckily has. My team is using LabView to program the robot. If any of you can point me to a guide or comment about your own experience that would be awesome! Thanks and good luck!
Those are addressable LEDs. They would be controlled by a separate co-processor like an Arduino. The cRIO would tell the Arduino what to display via one of many options: Serial, I2C, SPI etc.
I would have the LEDs driven by a driver controlled by an arduino. You may not even have to connect the arduino, it’s capable of running the LED animations by itself. One thing you may want to do is have the roboRIO tell the ardunio what team color you’re playing, you can do this with a wire. There’s a function call for this in the C++/Java API, but I don’t know about LabView.