Sentinel Breakout Board with CTRE Magcoder

Technical Electrical
1

Hey there everyone!

I’m working on a robot at Michigan Technological University for the NASA RMC: Lunabotics… challenge. Doesn’t sound as good as FIRST Robotics Competition. Anywho, we are using a Talon SRX in conjunction with a CTRE Magcoder. I am personally in charge of the software but I’m pretty knowledgeable on the Electrical components because almost all of them are from FIRST and I was a student for 6 years in FRC and 1 year as a mentor.

Now I was creating a basic program to run the robot through its paces when it finally gets built at the end of this month/beginning of November and I came across the fact that the electrical team is using limit switches to limit the movement of our excavator. I have done this exact operation in FIRST Power Up with our cascading lift, however, they were planning on wiring them all the way back to our RoboRIO. On my team, we used the Sentinel breakout board and wired the limit switches directly into Talon SRX. Again, however, we were not using the CTRE Magcoder.

Therein lies my question. Can the Sentinel Breakout Board be used in conjunction with a CTRE Magcoder? Is it just as simple as cutting the end of the data cable and soldering it on along with the Limit Switches? Doable, but I want input first.

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I believe the MagCoder has limit switch inputs on the back of it. You wouldn’t need the Sentinel Breakout Board


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I didn’t even know those existed. I’ve only worked with the MagCoder once but not on a robot, only on a breadboard. Thank you so much!

4

It is that “simple” as that but who wants to cut up the gray cable and its microscopic wires?

We use this to break in to the data cable:

https://www.ctr-electronics.com/talon-srx-encoder-breakout-board.html

Another way is the Mag encoder has limit switch inputs on the back side and you can hook them up there also (Section 4).


If you run the limit switches through the Mag Encoder you loose the visual indicators on the sentinel however if you know the Talon LED indications it will tell you limit switch info also.
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