Robot Lighting

Technical Electrical
21

Those are very nice, but we never have open PWM slots. We do have open solenoid connectors though, and this 16 foot long strip works beautifully:

http://www.amazon.com/Zitrades-Flexible-Waterproof-Sleeve-Ribbon/dp/B007XA6ZKO/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1337286079&sr=1-1

Be careful though, it’s near the upper rule-legal limit for total wattage. The rule is 21W for the 4 slot crio solenoid breakout, and this runs 20 mA * 100 * 12V = 24W. You can trim leds off the end to make it match whatever available wattage you have. It’s bright as all get-out. You can see one here:

Imgur
(it’s much brighter than shown in the photograph)

22

WHOA! That’s a bargain! $16.99 for 16 feet of lighting? We’ve been trying to add lighting effects to our robots for years but have only come across the automotive type strips that end up costing more than $10/ft! This is awesome. Thanks for posting it!

23

WHOA! That’s a bargain! $16.99 for 16 feet of lighting? We’ve been trying to add lighting effects to our robots for years but have only come across the automotive type strips that end up costing more than $10/ft! This is awesome. Thanks for posting it!

24

We used very similar LED strips this year and last. We’ve generally run them directly off of the Power Distribution Board, or through a Spike if we wanted to be able to trigger them on or off.

25

That’s the way we started doing it, but this year they made a nice change that lets you runs loads off the solenoid board. I was very happy to save the wiring and weight of a spike.

26

For our ring light we connected it directly to the PD board saved the wiring and weight of solenoid breakout:yikes: (yeah, my team has been reluctant to switch over to the breakout due to the ‘hassle’ of putting 2-pin connectors on all of our solenoids. Also the solenoids look cooler with 12 gauge wires, and the connectors for the solenoid breakout don’t play well with wires that big.)

27

Please note that the 9472 is only rated for 750ma per channel which is 9 watts at 12 volts, or 18 watts at 24 volts when used in either Crio chassis.

28

I found the same lpd8806 individually addressable rgb strips for 117 bucks. A full tutorial on the strip and some code, pretty good for those who haven’t come across it yet: http://www.ladyada.net/products/digitalrgbledstrip/index.html

First thing I suggest you do is load that library, pull up the strand test example and load it onto your teensy then have some fun with it.

29

During the offseason, our team has made a neat light controller for two independent colors of RGB LED lights. We used our own PCB with a MAX232 IC to connect the cRIO serial port to the serial connection of a ATMega328 microcontroller(The one found in newer ardruinos). The ATMega328 would receive a color command from the cRIO and it would use its 6 pwms to switch the transistors for the common anode LED’s. It makes a great project and it only requires 24 components so routing the PCB was really easy. If anybody is interested, I can post an eagle board and schematic, as well as our labview code and the code we used on the atmega. The atmega has the arduino bootloader so it can be programmed through the arduino enviornment.

30

Try led lights they will consume less battery.

31

If you want cheap lights, try eBay. I bought 5 meters of the REALLY bright RGB LED’s for only 15 dollars! Also, they’re waterproof and come with a nice connector and some sticky stuff on the back. They also smell really awful.