Electrical Resources
Over the past couple of years we've had trouble keeping batteries charged at competitions. Part of the problem has been knowing which batteries are charged and which need charging- this has been solved in part by using color-coded tags, but if there's no tag on the battery, we have to dig a multimeter out of the electrical box to determine the charge. Here's how we made a compact voltmeter that goes connects right to the Anderson connector on the battery.
This tutorial provides a brief description of the majority of items which you will find in the kit of parts. Its purpose is to identify kit of parts items for new team members. Follow on videos provide more detailed descriptions of how to connect components to the control system and how to write software that uses them.
In this tutorial, the team identifies how to set up a simple development platform for the FIRST Robotics Competition. We identify how to install and wire the necessary components to use with the default robot project. We discuss wiring of the power distribution board, cRIO, analog module, digital module, digital sidecar, and victor motor controller.
In this video the team explains in detail how Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) works. PWM is used in the FIRST robotics competition to control the speed and direction of the Victor and Jaguar motor controllers.
In this tutorial we explain how to configure your Jaguar motor controllers for use in CAN mode, an advanced way to communicate with your motor controllers. We cover creating your cables and re-flashing the Jaguar firmware. These are the procedures and methods we followed to create our wiring for the 2011 season. We had zero issues/problems with our CAN wiring throughout the entire season (2 Regional competitions, 3 off season competitions, an numerous demonstration events).
In this presentation we cover the details of the new 4 slot cRIO (cRIO II) from National Instruments. Available for use on robots starting in the 2012 season.
This tutorial outlines how to go about desiging custom Printed Circuit Boards for use on your robot, using professional software tools. It will walk you through the process of part file design to board layout and routing using our custom solenoid breakout board as an example project.
