Claremont 12.15.12

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Attendance

  • Fletcher
  • Mark
  • Hunter
  • Dante
  • Erik
  • Evan

Journal

Tasks

  • Get first place
  • Get the Inspire award
  • Get chosen for the winning alliance

Reflections

At this competition at the beautiful Webb School in Claremont, California, we had a great time.  We started our day by setting up our poster board which we built the night before.  Many teams were impressed how we had a monitor in our poster board.  After, Hunter, Fletcher, and Evan went and did hardware and software inspection and Mark, Erik, and Dante went and scouted.

The inspections were uneventful; we had to update a couple things, firmware and program chooser namely.  The robot passed.

Scouting went well.  We scouted 7 of the 14 teams at the beginning and 7 of the 14 teams at lunch.

Then came our first match.  It started wonderfully with the flawless blocking autonomous, then came the TeleOp phase where we got 2 rings on the top level for 30 points, which won us the match, 30 – 0.

Our second match came, going similarly to the first.  We won again, 15 – 0, putting us in 1st place.

We then had lunch, and during our lunch we put rubber inserts into the treads on the robot in order to give it more traction.

Our third match came and did not go how we expected.  The autonomous worked, but it struggled turning.  The TeleOp phase also did not go smoothly.  Rings were not gotten from the dispenser quiet so well, rings were not put on the rack easily, rings were dropped.  We did not win this match, so we investigated the problem between matches.  We had too much traction.  The rubber inserts did what they were designed to do, but they did that too well.

After lunch, we removed them and all was well, but our most difficult opponents were yet to come.

We had a match where we and our alliance partner felt that we could get 2 tic-tac-toe bonuses, though we did not, and we ended the match losing badly.

We had another lost match, and ended the tournament in 14th.

12.14.12-The Poster, the Bot, and the Management

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Attendance

  • Mark
  • Hunter
  • Fletcher
  • Evan

Journal

Tasks

  • Better cable management
  • Place the monitor in the poster board for the slideshow
  • Finish the poster
  • Finish the biographies
  • Create a Bill of Materials

Reflections

Evan started the meeting by doing some cable management.

Hunter worked on making a new poster board for the competition tomorrow.  He cut a hole in the poster board and put a monitor in it so that we can display a slideshow of our amazing achievement.  Hunter is going to work on the poster board further when gets home.

Mark worked on writing some pages for the website such as the About Us page and the Biographies page.

Fletcher made a page Bill of Materials so that it is straight-forward to reprint it for each competition.

Hunter had an epiphany where he found that the current hand was inconvenient when another robot blocks us, but that we could reach over them by using a slide mechanism than moves forward and backward.

12.13.12-The Rubber didn’t Burn

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Attendance

  • Fletcher
  • Mark
  • Hunter
  • Dante
  • Chris
  • Erik
  • Evan

Journal

Tasks

  • Perfect all we can on the robot
  • Put rubber inserts in our treads
  • Continue to improve notebook
  • Plan driving to the competition
  • Test every parts

Reflections

Today was our second to last meeting before the Claremont competition on Saturday.  We made some of the last adjustments to the robot but we did some testing.  We put the rubber inserts on the treads.  This actually completely messed up the driving.  The parts of the treads that had sprockets on them would move up and down based on wether there was a large gap between inserts.  This did not make the driving of the robot immediately better.

Evan found that one of the drive shafts for the scissor lift was damaged, so that ended up needing to be fixed.

The rubber inserts took forever to put in which left us with barely any time left.

Mark worked the entire time on the notebook but still has a lot left to do.  We took the robot home after the meeting.

12.11.12-Pre-Competition Checks

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Attendance

    • Mark
    • Evan
    • Hunter
    • Dante
    • Erik
    • Fletcher

Journal

Tasks

  • Make sure everyone gets permission forms for Saturday
  • Test the robot and find and fix problems
  • Install new innovations that were worked on over the weekend
  • Plan how to make the trifold display for Saturday
  • Add to the journal

Reflections

Time to get everything as ready as possible for the Claremont FTC competition on Saturday.  First we installed a new motor box so we could plug each motor for the scissor lift into separate ports.  Evan thinks that this has made the scissor lift twice as fast.

We also installed a new, more simple hand on the robot that is a basket with two compartments for 2 rings and it is made out of metal and does work better than our old hand.

Then we got to testing the robot.  This showed we probably shouldn’t for the top row because our scissor lift was really slow and it is hard to make the driving exact in getting right under the rings to pick them up so we want to make a mechanism that moves the hand forward on a slide so the driving just had to be in the general area and the accessories driver can take care of the rest.

We have also lately been talking a lot about infrared sensors and how to use them to detect exactly where the IR sensor is so we can get the extra fifty points in the autonomous period.

Hunter and Fletcher, since the programming did not need too much work, made a lot of ideas on the whiteboard about how we could improve our display on the trifold because we just threw it together last time and we would like to put an actual screen on the display while having all of our faces and a short biography about our team.  See here for a detailed explanation.