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Fryddog
Joined: 24 Sep 2015
Posts: 75
Location: Adelaide
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Adelaide Antwieght Arena
Thought I'd start something describing our Adelaide Antweight Arena and any future upgrades we make.
The arena is 1.2m x 1.2m, with 100mm high walls. The arena is made of 12mm plywood, with some timber bracing underneath. The arena sits on the legs stripped from two cheap bunnings saw horses.
It also has a shelf on either end to hold your beer while decimating your opponent.
The arena has two 150mm x 150mm pits. They are each activated by a 12V door solenoid (found on ebay). They each have a detachable box for catching those unfortunate bots.
The shield we made for the arena is 3mm polycarbonate, bought from Kinda Plastics in Para Hills. Also put in two little hatches on opposite corners for putting bots in.
The shield disassembles into four pieces for transport.
Doing all the thinking and counting for our matches is an Arduino Mega. The Arduino is connected to a relay board, a mini amplifier with speaker and two 3D printed remote boxes (credit: James2 again!). The boxes hang on opposite ends of the arena and unplug from the wiring to allow for transport. The remote boxes each have a start/pause pushbutton, a reset pushbutton, a blue running led, a yellow active hazard led and green minute indication leds (1 min, 2 min and 3 min).
When the start button is pushed, the Arduino starts counting down from 3 seconds and then starts timing a 3 minute match. With each countdown second and with each minute marker, a tone is played through the speaker and the corresponding green minute led is lit up. If the start button is pushed during a match, the count is paused and a tone is played. The match is resumed with another start button push. The reset button is pretty self explanatory; a push on this stops and resets the match clock and puts the Arduino back to a state that is ready for another match to start.
Anywhere between the 30 second and 60 second mark during a match, each pit solenoid is activated randomly. A 5 second warning tone is sounded before each pit activation. Each pit solenoid deactivates 5 seconds after activation (once the pit hatch has dropped) to save on battery power.
This is one of the remote boxes (the shield is cut out around each remote box):
The next upgrade will be adding another remote box, mounted on the arena wall. This box will house a 2x20 character LCD module. Once programmed right (fingers crossed!), we will be able to set parameters for each match (only before a match starts) without having to re-upload program changes from my lappy, to the Arduino every time. This remote box will also house a key operated switch, to prevent anyone from messing with the parameters before a match.
The parameters I was thinking of throwing into this display were:
- match length
- hazard activation and times
- tone selection
- Match time indication (displayed once a match starts)
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Fri Apr 15, 2016 10:54 pm |
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