Category: Engineering Notebook (Ring It Up)

Attendance

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

Journal

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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.

Attendance

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

Journal

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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.

Attendance

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• Hunter
• Mark
• Evan
• Fletcher

Journal

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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.

Attendance

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

Journal

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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!

Attendance

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• Evan
• Hunter

Journal

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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.