Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Robotics - Ball Input

We were reminded at today's robotics meeting that there are less than two weeks left before the first qualifying match we want to attend - and we don't even have a driving robot yet. Today, we continued our efforts to remedy that.

After the pep talk, I opened up the RobotC IDE and started teaching a new member of the team (previously on a different, non-school team) robot programming. She has never done any CS or development work, but she seems to be getting it. I think the idea of having her on the team is for her to be my assistant, but I don't really need any assistance. I'll try to continue teaching her things throughout the season.

Since having a Samantha module is very important to making the robot move, I dug out the one that wasn't working and tried again. For some reason, it worked today with the same flash drive I had tried before. Whatever the problem was, it's fixed, and we have remote communication with the robot. I wrote a tiny test program (while teaching the new recruit) that runs the first motor.

That was used to test the engineering team's almost-production-ready prototype for the ball input chute. It consists of a belt with rotating spokes in a tube. They were tinkering with it for most of the practice, and it seems to work very well now. Setting up the drive motors will be trivial; the remaining challenges are to get a good autonomous program and to actually put the balls in the high tubes.

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