New Innovation FIRST control system and the dashboard

Posted by Mike Sklar.

Engineer on team #21, ComBBAT , from Astronaut H.S. and Titusville H.S. and Brevard Community College and Boeing Company and NASA-KSC.

Posted on 12/14/99 12:33 PM MST

Does anyone know where to find out more about the new control system. I don’t see anything regarding
it on the FIRST website. On the Innovation FIRST website they have a wonderful picture of the new system.

This is what I know from hearsay. They will have programmable frequencies set automatically. Each
system has dip switches for a team ID. No more worrying about freqencies, interference and attaching rcvrs for each match. They use the new Parallax Stamp 2 processor. And the really big thing, is they have a dashboard port on the User Interface (ie transmitter) side. Supposedly this dashboard is a serial port that puts out various system data ( I assume relay, switch and PWM values in realtime).

That’s all I know. Does anyone know more. I am very interested in the dashboard. The big question is
how does it work and do we all have to build our own interfaces to display the robot status data or will
FIRST give us one. It would be nice to get a headstart.