You’re allowed to wrap wires for bundling and protection. Wrapping them in aluminum foil should qualify. Has anyone had success ending the IME static problem this way or another way?
A few years ago during nothing but net we used electrical tape to cover the holes and the ends of the wires. This seemed to solve the problem.
To be totally honest, I just wouldn’t use IMEs. Static is just weird and no matter what you do all it takes is one little exposure somewhere in the line to fry em all and cause a reset.
Also I believe wrapping in Aluminum foil is confirmed to be legal IIRC but double check.
Here is the problem: 4 potentiometers + 2 line trackers + 1 gyroscope + 1 power expander. 2 switches + 3 range finders. 7 motors left to measure. 4 of those chained in pairs reduces that to 4 motors to measure, 2 with continuous rotation, 2 with a few thousand degrees of rotation, and 1 that should be on a pot. Measuring all those motors means dropping important other stuff. The power expander could be disconnected from the analog ports without giving up much functionality, leaving room for 1 more pot. Far from ideal, but that would work. The range finders could be dropped to 2 while losing some important stuff, but maybe not critically. There still aren’t enough ports available (well, VEX pro, but that’s not an option). That’s why giving up the i2c slot is so painful.
I don’t understand we use IME and we never have any static problems.
Go to the bottom of this VEX page, look in Description → Notes.
https://www.vexrobotics.com/encoder-modules.html
mmm I see the problem. Can u post or pm a pic (of cortex), its pretty hard to visualize the specifics of the wiring from the description. There may be some way to get u some ports back.
Shielding the I2C cables with foil is a good start, but you can also ground the foil to the robot’s metal platform for better ESD protection.
I would make code that stores the value of the IME every `10 milliseconds and then reverts to a previous value if the IME changes by more than 200 tix. It worked for me.
I think this is the post for you: [https://vexforum.com/t/ime-technical-description-and-software-workarounds/23218/1)
@jpearman offers an exhaustive description of how IMEs actually work, but then if you page down, you’ll see that he has RobotC code for what @Aeden_6007 is recommending. I recommend reading/scanning the entire post, because it helps to understand how the IMEs work in order to understand what problems you’re trying to solve.