Cooler Master will be in the Robot Service Center for Houston this year. (yay!)
We are slowly trying to get our game plan together and just want to get some input since all of you know better than us when it comes to robots. What services and products would be good to have for teams? Keep in mind that it has to be something we make already. So far we have the following ideas:
3D printers available for use (really basic ones but they take up a lot of space)
Laptop coolers/stands
Laptop power adapters
Keyboard/Mouse replacements
We want this to benefit all of you as much as possible so now is the time to speak up. As always, we will have tons of giveaways (like last year) but we want to really make sure we fulfill our duty in the robot service center.
Fans would be good to keep around, I know that they’re kind of seeing less use with the advent of the Talon SRX, Victor SP, and SPARK, but I could see a team wanting some last minute fans for motors.
Edit: Also, since they’re just for robots, they don’t need to be PWM fans or quiet fans.
A scanner/copier/printer would be the most useful and would not be significantly larger nor more expensive than just a printer but would be much more useful than just a printer.
Of the idea’s CMBrandon listed Laptop power adapters would probably be the most useful, though given the array of different laptops that teams use it might be hard to stock a good variety. On the note of laptops, I might also suggest USB-Ethernet Dongles, as a bad network port on a drivers station can be a bad time for any team if they don’t have a spare.
The 3D printers might also be useful to make certain replacement parts, though print time would likely be an issue for all but the most simple parts.
I don’t see Laptop coolers/stands or Keyboard/Mouse replacements being used that much, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have them if you have space.
In regards to others suggestions about having a printer, I agree that they can be useful, but will note that if you guys decide to go this route, make sure the printers are Plug-and-play on Windows machines without an internet connection (as someone who works in IT support, this is a constant issue with some brands of printers).
I’ll also second the idea, though it might require FIRST to approve given the rules regarding it this past year, having spare 12v dc cooling fans available for teams to use for cooling components on their robots.
Cable management supplies would be nice to have available.
I know CM does a lot of stuff LEDs for cases, could bring some of that with converters to work on FRC robots (or at least instructions) because we all know LEDs just make robots better.
I was just about to ask about LEDs. Who knows what the 2018 game will be like, and how much abuse robots will take, but LED strips always seem to be the first thing to fail.
There shouldn’t be any converters needed on most standard LED strips. Just strip the 12v DC power cables that connect to the LED controller and connect to your PDP or VRM.
In my experience, this is usually the result of the low quality connections most LED strips use coming disconnected, not a failure of the strip itself. The best solution to this is generally to tape or glue all of the LED strip connection points.
All that said, nothing against having extra LEDs available.
Hmm, it would depend on a few things I think, our robots don’t typically utilize SATA power or motherboard header type USB connections (though the controller does have regular USB ports on it), so teams would have to adapt a few things.
Question:
If one of those controllers is powered on and configured using the normal means (connecting to a desktop PC), could the USB connection be disconnected and the controller still function under the previous settings, or does it require a constant USB connection?
I’m thinking teams should be able to power something like this relatively easily (all it would take is stripping the wires on a SATA power cable and plugging them in), but getting the necessary control software to run in our environment might be problematic. If the controller can run independent of USB, then you’re good to go, if not, it’s unlikely many teams would be able to utilize this unless they’re already using a Windows-based co-processor for vision or something like that.
What someone really needs to do is come up with a simple Motor-to-CPU Cooler adapter that would allow a standard PC heatsink to be used for motor cooling. Then you would have a TON of teams that could take advantage of Cooler Master heatsinks to improve motor performance.
EDIT: I had some free time, so I went and designed a heatsink adapter just for kicks. Apparently, the hole spacing for an LGA1150 socket makes for a perfect fit with MiniCIM motors…
In my experience, I found that extra laptops were always helpful.
During a Stronghold event last year, our main driver station laptop completely self-destructed, and we ended up having to use one of those basic KOP laptops from pit admin for the remainder of the event.
We thought that would solve all of our problems, but other teams kept needing to borrow it, and the battery would die if left unplugged for more than 20 minutes.
The problem is runtimes, thermal mass, and the design of CIM-class motors–by the time any part of that heat sink reaches “kinda warm”, the armature and internals of the CIM are probably well past “holy crap that’s hot”. (Terms used for lack of exact numbers.)
You’d be nominally closer by blowing air along the axis of the motor shaft, particularly on the end where the brushes are (I want to say that’s the rear where the motor leads are), but even that pales in comparison to actually circulating air inside the can and cooling the rotor and brushes inside. The problem is the only holes that go between the inside and outside that come on a stock CIM-class motor are the threaded mounting holes.
