For my mechanical engineering Senior Design project, our team is tasked with repurposing an XRP board to create a tethered submersible for pool use. We have everything connected and running (thrusters, camera, etc), but have a critical issue with controlling it once we put it in the water. Connecting to the WiFi coming from the board is not possible because of the water (obviously). So we need to know… can the XRP board receive controller inputs (from game controller) through its usb port using the FRC / WPI Lib firmware???. We want to use this firmware to keep all the super easy programming / UI (the project is for STEM outreach for young students and will be a kit sent to schools).
We could obviously start from scratch on the software side (serial connection stuff like that), but again would like to use the existing firmware / software suit to allow students to get the same experience as the terrestrial XRP kit. If not possible what are our options here? WiFi extender LOL? Any ideas, experience, or suggestions is greatly appreciated.
It might need to be modified but in theory that could work…it likely would not be ready as-is and you would need to build it from scratch as you mentioned
You could also try a simple extension cable and have a wifi/bt dongle/adapter floating above on a platform or something? Or perhaps a wired dongle that sits immediately next to the XRP’s board (underwater) wired to you from above (to make a VERY short-distance wifi)
Thank you very much! We tested having a WiFi extender that has an Ethernet jack directly next to the XRP within the submersible and seems to be stable!
Kind of redneck engineering but it works within our constraint of using the board / WPI Lib.
One last question… how do I use the extra motor headers as a servos? Our thruster ESCs run off of a 1-2 ms PWM with 1.5 ms being neutral. The servo pins work perfectly for this, but I cannot figure out how to assign any other GPIO pins (say the ones used for the motor encoders) as servos.
I have tried assigning the pins / channels with edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.Servo and I get nothing. I will certainly reach out to WPI if this is more their department. Thanks for any help!