Month: December 2012

Google Drive for Saving the Files

FletcherLeave a comment

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

FletcherLeave a comment

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.

12.4.12-Getting Ready for the Tournament

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Attendance

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

Journal

Tasks

  • Install elastic bands
  • Install new encoders
  • Test TeleOp
  • Get permission slip forms out to whole team
  • Test and fix the scissor lift

Reflections

Today we put the finishing touches on our robot.  We put our last encoders on two of the motors that power the scissor lift to make the autonomous more accurate.  We twisted the elastic bands together to further increase the tension on the lift.  We started to test the autonomous and had to make quite a few changes to it because it didn’t really work at first.  we also tested the TeleOp a little and had to make changes to that as well.

We discussed a lot about the competition on Saturday at Cochilla valley about things such as who the drivers and coach will be which we will finalize after more testing on Thursday, we finalized our spreadsheet of questions to ask all of the other groups.
Mr. Dobson confirmed that we would all go on Thursday to Bradoaks, one of the elementary schools, to bring our robot and talk to the GATE (honors) program about robotics to try to get them interested in it so they might join robotics in middle or high school.  A lot of testing took place today as well as a lot of changes to the programming because there were many problems.

We found that the servos on the robots are crazy; especially with coding it.  Most of the day was spent attempting to code the servo with no success.

After Evan attached the encoders to the scissor motors, Fletcher wrote a test autonomous that told the robot to rotate the scissor motors 400 units and it succeeded!  Hooray!

12.2.12-Smart Connections

FletcherLeave a comment

Attendance

  • Evan
  • Hunter

Journal

Tasks

  • Create more tension in the chain
  • Correct Serial Issues
  • Change tension in the rubber pieces for the fork

Reflections

Evan messed messed with the chain to add more tension to it so it won’t come off the gear. He messed with the wiring by putting different cables in the correct ports. He also put the motor controllers in the right serial pattern. He determined that before competitions, we are to check chain tension, wiring, and bolt tightness. We got new steel pieces for the fork lift. We changed the tension in the rubber pieces on the fork, which will make the scissor lift have an easier time going up for the fist inch of travel.