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

Finished Practice Robot

Today we continued work on the practice robot. We finished the routing of electrical and pneumatics, we re-rigged the lift roping with turn-buckles and we had a robot running to test!

Starting at 9 this morning, teams began to join us. We had maybe 4 or 5 teams total (I don’t recall the exact number). I’m sure we’ll see a lot more over the course of the weekend. Some of these teams present were: Both Saints robotics, 1258 and 1899, 488, Samamish High School and Seattle Lutheran (Sorry if I missed anyone). To get prepared for this, we had the entire team down cleaning, vacuuming and preparing the finished field. We blew up game pieces, fixed popped ones, laid out carpet, etc.

We had the opportunity to see some teams practice driving, attempt to score autonomously, and deploy minibots. It’s always fun to see how other teams approached the same design challenge, but in different ways.

Our own robot didn’t make it out of the shop, but it was finished around dinner time. When I say finished, I mean fully operational. On top of this, we have our final robot (which is a slightly better replica of the practice bot) almost done mechanically. The lift was rigged and mounted to the drive base. Some electrical has been mounted, but we still have a lot to add before it’s ready to bag and tag on Tuesday. With a practice robot ready, we can continue to practice and work after our robot has been shipped!

Even though everything is prepped and theoretically functional, we didn’t test all systems today. The most complex system  to program and control is the lift, the programmers played with their PID values and lift code to perfect speed, accuracy and height. With astute detail to perfection, we ended up with a lift which can rise to all of the necessary heights by the end of the night, engage the pneumatic brake and hold position. Here’s a video of the fruit of the programming labor:

(Bear in mind that was merely 65% of Full power )

The pushing mechanism/popper was tested yesterday, so this wasn’t played with. The arm to lower the Raptor claw to the floor and the claw pistons themselves weren’t tested. These are much easier to prepare than the lift though, as you saw with the piston, it was practically ready to work as soon as it was wired. With the pistons, the programmers can essentially program the air to push the piston entirely out, or bring it in. With a two state function to control, this should hopefully be a task which we can finish early in the morning.

Tomorrow, I think that we can realistically have our robot driving on the field before lunch. We need to test the arm/end effector before mounting our neon green practice bumpers, but we should be there quickly. With that done, we can test it in it’s natural environment, with game pieces, pegs and maybe even a robot to play defense on us! We can also test the autonomous (hopefully). As of right now, it should drive forward, follow the line, stop short of the pegs to score. If we can include the lifting to height and popping, we should be able to score.