At competition everyone’s driver station was powered just by the serial. Anyone know how they hooked that up?
its all in the software. they have the driver systems and at competitions there is some built in recognising software tht will determine if the connection is by a certain pit or by the field admin.'s. well, thts my guess anyway.
What serial?
The DS power at a competition field was provided through the competition connector, That’s where the dongle with the enable switch goes when not at an official field.
Alan is correct. That port isn’t an actual serial port, it is some sort of hybrid creatureish-monster thing.
The competition port was a D-sub connector though, wasn’t it? I’m not trying to be sarcastic, I’m really trying to find out.
But anyways, I can almost remember seeing some FIRST documentation on it. I’ll try to dig it up and post it for you.
Edit: Closest thing I could find was this. I really wouldn’t recommend trying to make your own connector. The DS is already pretty janky as is.
Edit 2: I fixed the link.
The only official documentation I know of is in section 3 of the FRC Control System manual.
Competition Port – Connects to the Field Management System through a DE9 connector to provide power and enable/disable during competition. Pinouts for this connector are in section
The text in the manual stops without identifying the section. Section 3.1.7 is labeled “Competition Port Pinouts” but has very little actual pinout information.
The competition port is used to enable / disable the robot. A “dongle” is provided in the Kit of Parts for teams to use for this purpose when not in a competition. If teams need to make a replacement dongle or need additional spare dongles, a team-constructed dongle can be fashioned by connecting pins 8 and 9 of the competition port to a switch. NOTE: it is essential that the other pins of the connector be left unconnected, as some of the other pins contain power and/or ground – accidentally shorting other pins of this connector can permanently damage the Driver Station.
If you really want to power your Driver Station through the competition port connector, you can very easily check for continuity between the power input jack and specific pins on the port.
I’m not sure that this would solve your particular need. But since you weren’t allowed to use wireless in the pits…
What we did to provide power to our DS while working on the robot, was to use
the power meant for the wireless gaming adapter. It has the same power requirement as the DS. So all the power came from the 12volt battery on the robot.