Thank you so much for all the offers and advice, everyone. The problem has been solved!
My team is getting rid of several older non-historic bots. I grabbed one on my way out the other day. It is fully functional, minus a cRIO. Would anyone be willing to sell me one for the purpose of a chair bot? Also, are there any other possible control solutions besides one? This will never need to operate remotely.
Edit: forgot to mention, it has all elevators and manips removed. All it needs to control is parallel plate w/2 cims per side.
There is the hero from CTRE, or perhaps the quick and dirty system from andy mark. It’s really dependent on what you need (encoders, gyro, etc).
With the Crio, you will need more than just that to make it work. There are different cards that go in the Crio - analog, digital, pneumatic. You may want to double check to see what exactly you need to make it work.
If you’re going with the Crio, you’ll also need to find an older version of labView. I believe 2014 still handles the Crio. Scroll down this page a bit to find the LabVIEW software.
My understanding is team221 is no longer producing the first party hardware, but the Gorgon Flex Controller is still available on AndyMark: https://www.andymark.com/products/gorgon-flex-with-ethernet-robot-controller and there is also a “Hardware Agnostic” library where you can use almost any arduino with an Ethernet Shield.
If you are going to go through the work of using a CRIO. Why not throw a rpi on it? It would offer the smallest foot print as your control head would be the same system as your controller.
If you are looking for a chair bot you would be able to program the rpi to use a USB controller and output PWM to your motor controllers. Pretty simple and I am sure there are plenty of examples out there in the python world on how to code it.
So our team took apart a few old robots this past summer and if you know exactly what you need for the robot ie. the card things than I can check and see if we can hook you up. One thing to keep in mind is that very few people have the software to compile the code to put it on a c rio and also few people have the driver station for it. I know that our team has the driver station program but we don’t have the code compiler. You will also need a laptop with windows 7
we run our normal robo rio driver staions ours off of windows 10. The roborio driver station is backwards compatible with windows 7 but it can’t run c rio robots. The C rio driver station that we have only runs on windows 7 and it is not forwards compatible
that has happened to me multiple time when one of our mentors through something away and I wanted to keep it just in case. so I ended up spending around 2-4 hours digging through a trash can to get what I wanted to keep and some other stuff. For example he through away 2 perfectly good reusable tote bags. Lets just say I was not happy
I know we do.