Author: Fletcher

I like to do robotics, play in the school band, and blog blogs. My Twitter description is highly accurate: "Some Idiot"

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.

12.7.12-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.

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.