Month: December 2012

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.

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.