Coachella Valley 12.8.12

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Attendance

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

Journal

Tasks

  • Either get in the top four or get chosen for an alliance
  • Make our robot work every time we have a match
  • Make it through all inspections
  • Put at least one ring on the top row
  • Win most of our matches
  • Do good

Reflections

Today was our first field competition, at Coachella valley.  Although we didn’t win or qualify,   in hindsight it went very well and was extremely good for a first competition.  With some difficulty we were finally able to get through the hardware, software, and field inspection.  With just a few more modifications to our programming and hardware design we finally got all of the components we had on our robot to work, at least after taking off the primitive forklift that was not quite ready yet to use.  In the first match out robot score one point by dropping accidentally a single ring onto the middle goal.  In our second match we actually put two rings on one of the top pegs on the center goal and won the match.  That was definitely our best run because on the others we weren’t able to put any rings on and we only won one other match because of our alliance.  Also, on a good note, our autonomous we had did make the robot move every single time which stood out from other robots of which only about 5 more even had a working autonomous.  Our autonomous did nothing but move our robot on the center goal but it was comforting to know that it worked how we wanted it to.  In the end, the biggest problem with our robot was the compete slowness of the scissor lift, that and the fact that our hand was a little too complicated and we needed to simplify and strengthen it.  It was a pretty successful first competition but we had a lot of work in the week ahead in moth modifying the robot but mostly in driver practice.  In that competition Dante drove the robot and Erik did accessories but neither of them had any prior practice because the robot didn’t start working like we wanted until the night before so we planned to spend a lot of time in the next week doing mostly driver practice and improving our notebook.

12.7.12-To Servo with Love

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Attendance

  • Hunter
  • Mark
  • Evan
  • Fletcher

Journal

Tasks

  • Figure out how to make the servos work
  • Improve the notebook
  • Make last adjustments to robot
  • Test everything and troubleshoot problems
  • Make the posterboard for the display

Reflections

Today we had a build day at Evan’s house.

First thing we worked on was the servos. Hunter tried changing the serial order that controller boxes were in to no avail. We then tried just plugging in the servo box with no motor controllers, still with no avail.

Fletcher came in late due to a Horn section function and looked at the code. After several more non-successful attempts, Fletcher revealed that he and Mr. Corey Porter, a computer engineer at a company, edited the servo part of our TeleOp. Fletcher applied the edit to our present TeleOp and then tested it on the robot with promising results! The hand twitched when we pressed a button and twitched in a different direction when we pressed a different button. Another button made the 360 servo turn, though it never stopped turning. After several tests where we commented out the commands that made the 360 servo go left and right, we decided that the 360 servo was demented. After closer inspection, Hunter found that the servo we were referring to as the 360 servo in the code was actually the plain servo. After this problem resolved, the hand opened and closed beautifully. After uncommenting all the 360 servo commands, it also worked beautifully.

After we got our servos working, we made sure all the other bits on the robot worked.  The NXT motors that rotate rings gave us a little trouble, but after several tests, we got it working.

After we got all of our technical difficulties sorted, we turned our attention to the user interface for the driver.  Hunter made two buttons, B and Z, that tuned the levelness of the scissor lift.  We moved general scissor lift control from the right side to the left side of the controller for ease of tuning.

The robot is now functional and is ready for our first competition tomorrow at  the Coachella Valley.

Presentation at Bradoaks Elementary

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Attendance

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

Journal

Tasks

  • Present our program and robot in an interesting way to the kids
  • Get them excited about robotics to join in high school

Reflections

Today we got a new cart for our robot to hold it and all of our boxes and parts.  We went straight to Bradoaks elementary school to share our robotics program with the GATE (honors) students there.  It went very well.  All of the kids were excited and we did a before and after poll for who thought they may want to be in robotics in high school and there were many more after than before.  We let them drive the robot and talked about robotics in general, about all of its good, helpful qualities and how much fun it is as well as all of the hard work that goes into it.  Since we didn’t get to work on the robot today we will finish working on it tomorrow.


Google Drive for Saving the Files

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Recently, Google added to their great fleet of web services Google drive, which is a cloud-based hard drive for everyone to use.  Having a Google account buys you 5GB of space in the drive, but what can you use it for?

Our team is fortunate enough to have three computers at our disposal, each of which with its own RobotC license.  One problem we have been encountering during our build season is being on one computer, but that computer doesn’t have the TeleOp we were working with the other day.  This is where Google Drive comes in.  We installed it on each of our computers and concatenated each program file into one “Suit Bots Programs” folder, so now each of our computers has the latest of all the software files and its list will be updated every time we update one of the programs.

New Autonomous Style

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We will be trying out a new style of autonomous suggested to us by Mr. Corey Porter.  Often in coding, developers will write functions in a header file and execute them in a source file, like so:

//headerEx.h
void print_hello() {
   printf("Hello");
}
//headerEx.c
#include <headerEx.h>
int main() {
  print_hello();
}

And it’ll have output like so:

$ ./headerEx
Hello

We plan to do some of our autonomouses just like this so that we don’t have to redefine every forward or backward function for every autonomous; though when we need to redefine, we only have to do it once.