Kettle Falls Robotics 2014

Another 3D Printer

Reference to convert our CAD files to STL for printing on a High-end Stratasys 3D printer. I found a guy that has one in his office and he outsources print jobs.

Long Article on how to use rotary encoders

You can buy the LS7184N encoder to counter chip here. Last price 3.05

Guide to using encoders and the different methods available

This shows the code to use the LS7184 encoder converter. The converter makes the code very easy and saves a lot of processing.

Here is the LFLS7184 encoder converter. Last price was 3.20. This can be used to convert the A and B signals from an encoder and convert to a simple direction and counter signal

This is an encoder clock converter. It takes the A and B inputs of an encoder and converts them to very simple counter signals that can be passed to the computer. This will greatly reduce the load on the main processor.

Encoder Library. Need to check out to see if this may be the fast easy way to go.

How to program a encoder

These guys build custom PCB circuit boards. They have free circuit design software. They are located in WA. Just in case we wanted to design and build our own circuit boards.

A pcb circuit board manufacture. They recommend using the Eagle free PCB design software to design the boards.

Very hard to find support ticket page to Autodesk

Here is a 9-axis IMU sensor ( gyro/accelerometer/magnetometer) that plugs straight into the roborio MXP port and provides high-end navigation information. It also adds a whole slug of I/O ports to boot. Has Java libraries and sample code. 99.00. This is a no brainer.

I agree, We saw this last year when we were having troubles with the other gyro/accel but were not in a place we could secure it in time to be of any use. I would say this would be a great addition to the auto capabilities. I like it.

Absolute position encoder that would work on the control panel to create a rotational angle input to the driver station. Everything is in the package and would be very easy to implement. Just a knob.

Good article on hall effect switches and latches that can be soldered on pcb boards and used to detect the presence of a magnetic field and converting that to a digital signal.

I like the latching. Was one of the issues we had with the elevator and the hall effect sensors. We had to wait a certain amount of time so that it would not recognize the same magnet more than once. The latching would have make it work exactly how we wanted it to. We might want to see if we can get a catalog or something for sourcing some of these electronics.

PCB connector system to go from PCB board to a wiring plug.

One of Three videos showing how to design a printed circuit board and to create the files needed to have the board built. Price to get a custom board are pretty reasonable. between 5.00 and 50.00.

Here is the download page for the Eagle PCB design tool. It look pretty good and I found some video's on how to use the software to create our own boards.