IR LED to dim...
Me and my partner are trying to increase the voltage to the ir LED's. The robot we are working on is a SumoBot(prob ™[noparse];)[/noparse]. It has basic stamp 2 on it. We have tried everything, and short of hooking it straight up to a battery (which the recievers don't pick up) we cant get it to work! HELP PLZ
Comments
1) It's not simple to increase the IR detection distance. There are all sorts of ways to try, but a lot of them won't work with the Sumobot because of the way it has things built-in. Just making the IR LEDs brighter won't necessarily work because you'll have more reflections and the area lit by the LEDs may broaden. Think about using a flashlight to light up a dim room. As you brighten the flashlight beam, more things may show up to the side of the beam. The detector may falsely trigger on those.
2) If you tried connecting an IR LED directly to a battery, you've probably destroyed it. It doesn't take long for the internal wires in the LED to melt when too much current is applied.
Say more about what you want to do with the distance detection ability.
There's nothing really that you can do to improve the IR detector unless you have a lot more experience with electronics than you seem to have. You could make a "hood" for the detector to narrow the area that it "sees". I've used a spare black plastic tube like the one used over the LEDs. You can cut off the extra bits so it fits over the "bulge" on the front of the detector, then fasten it with a tiny bit of glue so the glue doesn't block the "view".
Post Edited (Mike Green) : 1/9/2010 2:48:59 AM GMT