Objective
The objective of this blog was to determine the most suitable application for both a rocker switch and a pushbutton switch
Theory.
From the diagram above, we can see the circuit diagram for both the pushbutton switch, on the left, and the rocker switch, on the right, from this diagram it can be seen the operation. the purpose of a switch is to disconnect, and reconnect a circuit, while leaving the user isolated and safe from any electrical connection.
the choice of each switch depends on the situation in which you are presented. you must ask yourself a single question.
what action must the switch perform?
If the answer to the first question is momentarily, then a push button switch is your answer, if not, a rocker switch will perform the action, another more advanced form of switch is known as a relay, but that can also be activated with a rocker switch, so we will ignore that for now.
if the action of the switch is to hold a current, then a rocker switch is what you will need, this takes one input from the user, then holds that state until the user interacts again. whereas a pushbutton only activates as long as the user is interacting with the switch.
Pushbutton vs. Rocker
Uses.
For uses, in a practical sense a rocker switch is more applicable for use of a disconnect switch, for power, such as you would find in a light switch, where the circuit to the lamp is broken by the switch. in the case of the robosumo, it was used to disconnect the battery from the breadboard, turning off the robot.
a pushbutton has more use as an input to the robot, whereas in my case i had used the pushbutton in order to reset the robot, by using a series of states, whenever the robot detected a closed signal from the pushbutton, it would reset to state ‘0’.
Conclusion,
Choosing the correct switch is definitely dependent on the application and i feel as though i have a better understanding of which switch to pick
RoboSumo Engineering Practice and Design DESI1602: 2020-21 