Robotics - Moving Around

As I'm pretty used to by now, very few people came to today's robotics meeting! We did at least have an engineer, who was tinkering with a generic frame and trying to make do with our lack of relevant parts. (We have no axle hubs, not enough motors, not the right kind of wheels, a broken Samantha module, the wrong type of battery connector, and a poorly-functioning wire stripper.) While he worked with that, I oversaw the continued assembly of the field.

We got the kickstands and ball holding chambers set up yesterday. Today, we riveted the small wooden parts involved in the mount of the high center ball tube. We would have attached the tube and the guard/wrapper/thing around it, but for some reason the instructions call for that to be done with a stapler and we couldn't find one.

More interestingly, I continued work on the other team's tele-op program. I ran a test with buttons and tones to determine whether anything involved in the joystick was being sent to the robot - it was. I tried controlling motors with buttons - it worked, but there was insufficient traction on the wheels to move with only one wheel at once. After they fixed that, I tried controlling the motors again with the thumbsticks - it produced the same strange going-in-circles effect.

After a little bit of research (looking around in the example programs), I discovered that I not only have to call getJoystickSettings(joystick), but I have to use the "joy1_y1" and company members of default "joystick" variable. I had tried both of those things individually, but apparently never together. For some reason, the joy1Btn function works even if I don't call getJoystickSettings. Anyway, I hooked the thumbsticks up to the motors again and they were able to drive.

People were very excited, so I gave everybody in attendance a few minutes to drive the robot around. One managed to accidentally trip the kickstand, releasing a flood of balls, which was pretty exciting. Once everybody had their turn, I started implementing a virtual gearing system for precise controls. Unfortunately, their NXT ran out of battery power, so testing that will have to wait until next time.