I’ve noticed a couple people have said that you can use 2 controllers at a time for competitions on vrc, while I knew you could do this, can I get some specifics? do you still swap controllers? Is it legal? Can you both control a bit of the robot, or a faster way to swap? I did a quick search and checked in the game manual and didn’t find anything.
Thanks
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In the past, my team has used two controllers for our more complicated robots. The controllers are linked with a physical wire between the two ports, and there is no requirement to switch drivers or swap controllers. Generally, we have had the controls split so that one driver controls the drivetrain and major subcomponents, while the other has control over things like the intake and gets data like motor temperature and pneumatic pressure printed to their screen. This year, our secondary driver may also have safety switches for expansion, so they don’t accidentally trigger and get us DQ’d. Overall, having a second controller rarely hurts if your team works well together. Hope this helps! Happy to answer more questions if you have them.
Edit: I did a dumb and wrote “brains” in place of ports.
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There is only one V5 Brain permitted in completion.
Two controllers talk to each other through a V5 Smart Cable between the two V5 Controllers. The V5 Controller that was paired with the V5 Brain is considered the primary controller from programming standpoint. Second smart port on either controller can be connected to the V5 Field Control (pretty much a V5 Brain running field control app), in this case, it is wise to plug the RJ45 legacy field control port to avoid accidental plugging of V5 cable in the RJ45 port and bricking the V5 Controller. Note that V5 Field Control may be configured not to provide charging power to the controllers, so be sure your V5 Controllers are fully charged at events using V5 Field Control.
As respondent noted, good to use two controllers in complex situations.
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Thank you that’s helpful, I’ll try that this year
You might remember my team from worlds, but you advised against doing this unless you have great communication and lots of practice.
I agree with this, and my team still uses 2 controllers (One for driving, and one for everything else). We won multiple matches because of being able to have four thumbs and 16 (Only about 5 were used but) other fingers moving quickly.
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Indeed I do! You were the team with only two team members at Worlds, having lost your third teammate due to crushed finger earlier in the week. This is an important point for teams considering multiple controller operations - life happens, sometimes not at the greatest time. As stated, lots of practice is needed by all team members to be able to step into roles unexpectedly.
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As for swapping, there is NO requirement that drivers swap during a match. You can have the same single driver for an entire match. Teams using two controllers often do it if their robot is too complicated for a single driver to handle all of the aspects of the robot. As others have mentioned, it does take a lot of practice for the two controller system to work well. However, in my opinion, if done well, the two controller has real advantages over a single controller.
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YOU REMEMBER ME. My teammate is fine now, and we did better than any team from our school. The issue was, the 3rd team member was the backup driver. We got another teammate, Kathrin, and hope to make it to Worlds again.
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Now many control different functions of their robot with 2 controllers to make driving and controlling easier, as said before in this thread. We wanted to do something a bit different. For our last competition, we ran dual-controller, with 1 controlling the bot as usual, as if there was 1 controller driving, and the other controller was changing the velocity of the flywheel for launching at varying distances.
Now this idea was horrible, but we got it to work at least for the comp, shooting from long distances most of the time. It did help in getting the design award, and it was cool to show how it works. Though if anything this shows how you can do many different ideas and there are a lot of different possibilities you can try.
Thanks for the help, I just came from iq, and this is super informative. I didn’t know much of that, thanks.
Sounds like a job for the distance sensor.
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Some might argue that the 2nd driver is a “smart” distance sensor
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What if they have an IQ of 37?
Still better than sensors sometimes.
37 IQ? Oddly specific.
Also, is that an intended or unintended pun?
unintended, I don’t know the pun.
i just chose two random numbers that are low.
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