Connection Suspense

Hello Everyone,

Today I got so wrapped up with things that I forgot to snap pictures as we worked…=( We did get visited by King 5 today though! Here is a clip from the website. http://www.king5.com/video/featured-videos/Students-gear-up-for-Seattle-Regional-FIRST-Robotics-Competition-141449723.html We were officially supposed to be at school by 5:30am though a few of us got here a bit earlier. It was a long day, but definitely filled with excitement.

The morning for us proved to be a living example of Murphy’s Law were “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. We had a good turnout, don’t get me wrong, but the robot was working fine until we were on air and then it stopped having connection. We soon found out that the reason for its sudden failure to start was due to our nifty ambition to have both Rebound Rumble and Logomotion robots enabled on the field, but we eventually discovered that the IP address for both robots was the same…which gave us connection problems. We will probably start renaming IP addresses with the year of the competition for each robot to differentiate them in case we want to use two robots on the practice field again. Our main cause for the issue this morning was that it was something we hadn’t tried before, so any failures we could have prevented, we didn’t get a chance to fix ahead of time… Ah, isn’t it wonderful to have a practice robot to work with now? =)

Anyway, besides getting really excited and being live, we also had some work to do tonight. The meeting started with a briefing on the trip to Portland and we learned that when we go to the Seattle regional we are actually going to get to be right next to a team from Mexico! I am excited for this because as I said before, it is going to be a super awesome cultural experience and last time we had a team from Mexico they were quite spirited. I wonder if it will be the same one…

Probably the most productive thing we were able to do today in the electrical team was to get things ready and packed for competition. There is (hopefully) no tool that we will be in need of during wiring that we don’t already have in our boxes. It is a weird feeling, to want to have an event come so soon but also be delayed at the same time. Like every season, we have put a lot of work into the robot and it’s time to enjoy its results! There are finishing touches still to be done with the PID but we have Autonomous code ready for this game.

Wish us luck in our upcoming competitions and remember that FIRST would not exist without the support of our mentors and other caring adults, so thank you for sticking around and sustaining something that makes a difference in our lives.

Camila

Love is in the air compressor

Happy Valentine ’s Day!

Courtesy of Drew for providing us a list of Valentine hook up lines, love was in the air compressor tonight. <3

(after we pulled out the camera)

To begin with, I must apologize for the brevity of the posts lately as it has been a busy few days of homework and robotics. Nonetheless, today we got to do some fun stuff that I wanted to share with you.  This time of the year is when the wiring of the robot gets done and we cross our fingers that it stays under the weight limit (so far the conveyor assembly is a lovingly 37lbs, by the way).  As expected, the competition chassis and conveyor assembly got handed down to our electrical team and now we are getting to do some really fun stuff. Personally, I love stripping wires and soldering.  But yesterday we were a little silly, forgetting steps here and there – from which we learned for today. The story goes as follows <3 :

First, Jordan and I got our stripping tool and our new electrical box to solder a wire to the leads of the first motor of the night.

We fondly placed the shrink wrap on the wire and soldered, but when we tried to slide it over, the shrink wrap had contracted already… (as you may recall shrink wrap shrinks with heat; how silly of us to forget).

Well then, because we are so Olympic, we forgot to put the shrink wrap in during our second try and soldered the wire onto the motor leads (I’m sure you can guess where this is going.  I wish we would have thought of electrical tape before taking it apart though).

Eventually…with a good number of tries and some experience, we did complete the task. Below is a picture of us struggling to fix our mistakes during this failure-stricken process. I just couldn’t help but to get a picture of our fingers in distress. Man, working with wires takes a lot of patience! Thankfully we did much better today.

Electrical work from Monday

The beauty of wiring after things have been assembled

More electrical pictures with work being done on the chassis:

Working on wiring for the chassis

On another note, the build team installed pulleys on the practice conveyor assembly and made lots of progress. I am not allowed to show you a ton of the robot, but here are a few pictures of what we did.

Curtis hard at work

Michael measuring

Well, thanks go out once again to Aiden for the pictures, his phone is so magnificently handy.

See you all tomorrow, and thanks for following the smell even today

Camila