It’s kind of hard to top a day like yesterday. Returning back to work on individual components is rough, after you get a taste of the full working thing it’s hard to go back.
The shop people are essentially done with the “Full Practice Robot”, the electrical team is just finishing wiring all the components necessary to get the whole thing running. With this done, they are now catching the final lift and drive up to speed. The nice part is that we have a live example right next to us. Another plus, we’ve done it once, so we can go a bit faster. Also, a lot of the components were made in unison, so we have less to do this time around.
The end effector group worked on the popping mechanism, since the cylinders for the claw still haven’t arrived (they should be here tomorrow). We were unable to have the cross-bars for the scissor lift precision machined. So we did it ourselves… It needed to be really precise, but even with Ken checking it, we were roughly a 16th of an inch off. Oh well, we really should have waterjetted this in the first place (if we had caught the design flaw). The new ones will be fine and the rest of the work could all be done by students in one night (if all of the components we need arrive). This gave Jordan and I time to design some components to waterjet,brackets for the circuit breaker, status light and camera. If you look at the picture, the two brackets mount on the braces for the lift, while the camera is mounted on top of the inital lift stage (the one that doesn’t move).
I didn’t get down to the gym today, however, I guess that the programmers are still working on finessing autonomous. I am also guessing that the field crew is making everything look pretty/ready for the guest teams/visitors this weekend.
Speaking of which, I forgot to mention that the first team stopped by yesterday. Bear Metal FIRST team 2046 from Tahoma High School stopped by with a drive base. It looked good, but they were having problems getting it to run. They also said that their lift/other assemblies have a lot of work left before implementing. Having our field open/inviting teams not only provides them with space and a field to test, but we can provide them with help!
We started at 10 this morning with the plan of working until 4. The morning was a bit slow as we resumed tasks from yesterday. I can say I was a bit discouraged in the morning, but after the day went by, it was easily the most accomplished/memorable day yet!
As we worked on finishing the lift, we put some all-thread in between the arm brackets. Jennifer and I were placing the nuts where they needed to be, her with a wrench on the inside, and I with a ratcheting wrench on the outside. This was easily the greatest laugh of the day, so I had to add the picture. As we closed up the gap and locked it into place, Jennifer realized that she forgot to take the wrench off! It was stuck there….
We had a lot of good laughs today, with rather silly mistakes and camaraderie. Speaking of silly-ness, Mr. Steele made up names for the different Kliko Clamps and pretended they were dinosaurs. Needless to say, we are getting little sleep and have been too busy for 6 weeks. I am surrounded by dorks. *Note: But I love them all, even if they are all a little on the weird side*
Another exciting piece of news. We have the bumper fabric complete! Yesterday, Sam Swan’s (Alum, currently at University of Portland) mom came in. She has done the bumpers for the team each year and we always appreciate her work. She took the fabric home and got everything done! We always have clear team numbers and easily the cleanest looking bumpers at competition. Last year’s and this year’s were even reversible, so we could change our robot’s bumper color to match the alliance side we were on (Red or Blue). Thanks again Mrs. Swan!
We finished mounting the popping mechanism today. We have decided that we are indeed going to mount the two scissoring brackets together at the midpoint, as seen in previous post. With this job sent off to a precision machinist and cylinders on the way, this sub-assembly is pretty close to being done. If all goes well, it may have everything needed to work by Tuesday/Wednesday night!
Half way through the day (or so), I went down to the gym to check on the programmers and I went again a second time closer to the end of the night. The first time, they had been testing the line-tracking code for autonomous, it’s working all right! They had the ultra-sonic sensor mounted today and they are now working on stopping the robot at a certain scoring distance from the wall. It’s nice to see this in action. They are still having trouble with the fork in the tape down the center of the field, but I’m confident that they’ll figure it out.(Keep in mind, all of the code they’ve done for this base and the code for the other mechanisms has been done without the real base or robot!)
The second time I went down didn’t go so great. It was just Thomas and I, alone in the gym. So story goes as such:
We were driving the robot around, in 3rd gear. It’s tearing down the field. It currently had some PID issues, but nothing major to deal with. I drove it from one end to the other, around the field, etc. Just test-driving the new system. So I bring it down to one end, I stop. I then apply full throttle on both sticks. Screaming down the field at full speed, I pull back on the sticks with about 1/4 of the distance left. The PID issue bites us right about now. I had pulled back all the way, but nothing happened.
It crashed, full speed into the driver station. My dad and Rashil had pretty much put the finishing touches on the field today… It moved the entire side of the driver wall back a good few feet in spots, it twisted one of the human player locations out of proportion and left a pretty sizable dent. The robot was fine, as the wooden bumper on front protected it. However, I looked at Thomas and all I could say was (pardon my language, but I think you’d say it too, if you saw the damage); “Holy Shit”. Silence ensues for a minute or so. *ENTER father* Gulp… We fixed it and all ended well, but yikes, a scary thing.
It’s good we caught it now, Thomas fixed the code and we shouldn’t ever have that “non-responsiveness” in an emergency again…
On a slightly less excruciatingly painful note, we did things other than destroy stuff today! In fact, the Electrical team finished wiring the drive base’s critical systems, so we could start integrating our sub-assemblies. We mounted the finished lift on the base and weighed it along with some of the other systems tossed on. Here is a picture from the weighing ceremony:
Also, here are a few more shots of the robot:
That last shot was taken from the floor looking all the way up. Looking neat, eh? Here’s a video of the robot lifting tonight:
If you didn’t catch the talk at the end of the video, or didn’t understand it, here’s what we were talking about. As we tested the lift in this video, we were only using one of the two Banebots motors on the lift drive assembly. This means that the second motor was essentially “Back-driving” and hindering the other motor. Even with 50% power and a single motor, it climbed to the top in roughly 5.5 seconds! If you do the math, we could probably climb to the top at peak conditions in about 1 and 3/8 of a second. That’s uncontrollably fast (Like our Drive Base!).
I feel good about where we ended tonight, and I think it provided a morale boost for us all. We can’t slow down now, there is much more to complete. We found out that we are currently under our weight budget! We still need to finish the pneumatics, mount the raptor claw, figure out a min-bot deployment mechanism, but we aren’t in as much weight trouble as we thought.
It’s also nice to think that the robot you are seeing now is our practice bot, we should have around 1.5 robots done by Wednesday night, if all goes well. It will certainly be nice to have it after the build season is over. We’ll have an additional 3 weeks to fine-tune, practice driving and toy with it before the Seattle Regional. Cross your fingers that we continue to follow our plans!
