Robotics - The Last Practice

...though, to be honest, we had to actually make a lot of changes to the robot before practicing.

Coming into this last practice before our competition tomorrow, I didn't expect a lot needed to be done. However, there was actually still quite a bit that needed to be changed. First, the flag raiser needed to be replaced with something shorter to fit in the 18" cube. That was achieved by drilling holes in sheet metal and attaching the little pipes to those.

We also noticed that the hanger bar when folded down to fit horizontally was a tiny bit too tall. So, we took a Dremel and took off a few pieces, dusting the robot in shavings. It was only then that our helpful rules compliance officer (who is also the most frequently mentioned "engineering notebook person" on this blog) discovered that the robot may not exert pressure on the edges; a piece of paper must be able to fit between it and the box. Since our treads were wedged in, we failed to comply. To resolve that, we had to spend quite a bit of time moving the wheels in and removing tread links. (At least we got pizza.)

With everything sized, we moved on to driver selection. I ran the tele-op mode program and evaluated the team members' skills. Given those results and the decision of the team captain, it was determined that I will again run the ops controller and that two people - the captain and a less frequently attending builder - will switch off on the drive controller.

The next logical thing to do was test the autonomous, especially given our slight modifications to the physical layout. We discovered a few issues, such as sometimes hitting the bar (a penalty), which I fixed. I also went ahead and added some code to drive up onto the ramp even if no infrared beacon can be found. Near the end, I also updated the simple autonomous to work with the treads.

Cleverly preventing an all-nighter, the team supervisor volunteered to lend our field to the competition. At 8 PM after five hours of working, we disassembled the field, signed every component, and packaged it all into his car. I took the networking stuff, the captain took the robot, and the supervisor takes the field parts.

Ready.