okay so I had an idea for this year’s comp I saw online at one point. so basically it’ll use a vision sensor to shoot a pneumatics piston and hit the other color out of our possession. but the color it senses changes based on what color you are. so I thought what if there was a way to have the controller automatically detect what color you are when you get plugged into the new smart field brain? but I’m stuck on the fact that there are no ways I can find to have the controller talk to the comp brain. does anyone have an idea on how I start this?
There’s no way to do that.
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you would think that there is a way to do it, seeing as they have competition code commands already.
You could do something where you have a switch on the GUI of you brain, then when you boot up your program for comp, you flip the switch to either Red or Blue
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You could have an optical sensor or color sensor aimed at your license plates.
Otherwise you’ll have to write a program that selects your color either using the brain screen or a limit switch (similar to auton selector programs).
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yeah thats true i was thinking about just adding a button that will toggle the different codes. that way im not using multiple buttons and its still fast. it would be cool if vex would add something along the lines of that though.
I guess if we had though of that when writing the firmware we could have done it, I’ll take a look if we ever do another V5 controller firmware update. One issue will be finding space in the messages, probably ok from field control to V5 controller but, as far as I remember, there’s no space left in the radio packet between V5 controller and V5 brain , we used the last two bits in the status packet for (an as yet unimplemented) a feature related to the AI competition.
way back when we used colored field tiles to indicate the starting position it was possible to use the light sensor to auto detect red or blue, unfortunately not possible anymore.
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As an alternative for now, you can use:
- A GPS sensor
- AI Vision sensor (to guess position using the other field elements)
- Different programs based on your position
- Autonomous Selection in your program beforehand
- And some more things that I forgot.
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Our time uses a GUI on our controller where we select the auton before the match and select the color that we want to sort and then we plug in and it works.
i just created a toggle button that will change what color the vision sensor is looking for, when i get another chance ill make it print on the contoller that will tell us what color we are sensing.
My gut, you guys did think about this, but there may have been discussions about it being a priority with legacy VEXnet control systems out there, and manual match field control switch. The underlying thought process was to make as many events possible without requiring EPs to change much of how they do things (except GPS strips for Autonomous Coding Skills runs… )
I think current system is good, let teams figure it out, there are many “old school” solutions, such as checklists that pilots and doctors use to prevent harm.
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Another solution is to play around with a AI vison sensor to see your preload, then adjust your color settings for that (this can be done in pre-autom code)