Subject:
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Multiple IR Towers: Success
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto
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Date:
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Thu, 7 Mar 2002 14:01:07 GMT
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Viewed:
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933 times
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Hi folks,
Last night I went ahead and built what I thought was a good stab at a
multiple-IR tower connector cable. It worked, first go. Doh. So
Jeremy and I wasted much of our evening building time smashing our
robots into each other. Heh heh heh.
I was operating 3 IR towers arranged in a triangle around a roughly 1.3m
diameter space. The robots behaved well inside the space, but started
dropping messages a lot once they left the 'envelope'. Contrasted with
my earlier experience with 1 tower, this is a great improvement.
The cable will handle 4 IR towers - I just couldn't be bothered to
excavate a 4th one.
BTW - the signal output is clean enough to actually download software
with all the towers attached (haven't tried firmware yet), but the robot
has to be facing the "prime" tower, or the PC doesn't know the RCX is
replying. No biggie.
I also hooked up a 2nd control pad for head-2-head action. You're going
to have to learn to be careful about how many keypresses you use, and
how your robot behaves if it misses a signal... if you're madly mashing
buttons, a lot of the messages might get dropped because you only get to
send 1 message per cycle. This will get worse with 4 controllers, where
the latency and throughput will both get worse.
It's still pretty easy to mangle other robots, though. Gratifying,
too. Chris: get ready, I see Primal Rage in ABS just over the
horizon... it's a shoe-in once you get the adrenaline rush of knocking
another robot on its side and then kicking it until your kicker motor
falls off :)
Our (unnamed) team currently has two (unnamed) robots, and I might put
together a third and/or fourth tonight. My personal creation has a
strong tendency to disintegrate in varied and amusing ways, so I can see
it being a popular opponent. Jeremy was experimenting with rack &
pinion steering, so his is pretty fast and pretty wild. Pretty, too...
he was colour-conscious while he was building.
***
It's probably too early to make plans for the real event(s), but I think
one thing that would be *very* interesting is a 'team' battle
competition where each team gets N robots (or N RCXes), 127 messages,
and 1 (one) controller. Unless you're an arcade guru, you'll have
trouble controlling 2 or 3 robots simultaneously, so you'll have to add
a bit more software to handle autonomous behavior. EG: "Robot 1,
continue savaging the hapless opponent in your claws, Robot 2, I'm
taking direct control..."
I think this would be a *great* programming and building challenge, and
also diminishes the shortcomings of trying to use too many controllers
with the BBRC software.
***
Oh - from personal experience, I'd suggest leaving a 'kill' (all motors
off) message in your robot program (there is one in the default program,
btw) and setting the make AND break codes for one 'panic' button to that
message - that way if your robot is running amok, you can try to
completely stop it before it damages itself further.
***
Friday, I'll bring my patch cable and probably 3 IR towers as well as
two or more robots. I don't have a laptop; too bad for me.
Jeff E
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