Robotics [MEET] - Piano Man

Today was the first meet of the 2014-15 FTC season. This was a qualifier meet, so it was an opportunity to advance to state (for those that did well enough). Now, I held no delusions of adequacy or expectations to do well at all, but I was looking forward to seeing what others had come up with.

I made the final revisions to the engineering notebook in study hall. I then printed it out, stuffed the pages into individual page guards, and bound them in a three-ring binder. I had to tape the cover on because there were large smudges in the cover guard. The document looked pretty good all bound together, but it turned out we didn't need it at this meet - there was no judges' interview. I am glad I did it, though, or I would have procrastinated until the next meet and there would have been even more to write.

After the normal school day, we loaded the robot, our tools, and ourselves into some faculty vehicles and drove over to another high school where the meet was held. I'd say there were about 20 teams present.

Once we got our stuff unpacked and the robot on the table, I began programming the devices that had been added after I left yesterday's meeting. The other team (6723) had added a new motor and servo as part of their ball input mechanism. They also had a continuous rotation servo, which just spun continuously because I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything else. (I didn't have Internet access, and it was spinning the right way. I think our motto for this year so far should be "it's good enough.")

While I adjusted the programming, the builders continued tinkering with the ball intake device, eventually making it support both large and small balls. They also (after some matches) added a shield to mitigate trapping due to balls under the frame.

We passed software and hardware inspection easily. When it came time for the field test, though, we discovered that our battery was critically low. Many kind teams offered to loan us their battery or the use of their charger, but we just happened to have a really weird and unique connector for our battery that literally nobody had ever seen before. Though we had another battery, its fuse was blown. After much fumbling about looking for appropriate pliers, we put the working fuse from the empty battery into the full battery. It worked, and we passed field inspection.

Previously in study hall, I had created two autonomous programs (sort of three if you count the version for team 6723): one to do nothing (if we start in the parking zone) and one to drive forward for a few seconds (if we start on the ramp). In both cases, we end up doing nothing for a good amount of time. So, I thought of something for it to do while waiting: play the piano. Using the formula for frequency of the Nth note on a piano (which I happened to have open on a Wikipedia page on my laptop before I left an Internet-connected network), I created a routine to press random keys on a virtual piano for random (short) length of time. It sounded really cool, and thoroughly entertained the other teams during the matches.

Speaking of those matches, our general strategy was to use the appropriate autonomous program, drive around defensively during the tele-op phase, and push tubes onto and park the robot on the ramp. It turns out that most of the other teams there (or at least the ones we got paired up with) were in similar situations. We avoided kicking down the kickstands - it would release balls, which trip us up and are scoring elements for the other team - and tried to prevent the opposing alliance from kicking them down.

There were several hilarious moments:

• Completely failing to score any points and also receiving a major penalty for pushing one of our tubes into the opposing parking zone. We ended the game with a score of negative 30 and, needless to say, we lost.
• Losing control of one of the wheels due to a motor popping out of its mount, entirely disconnecting the gears. We were completely unable to turn or go up the ramp for the rest of the match.
• Experiencing the complete wireless disconnection of the alliance partner who was supposed to do all the actual achievement. We played music with the four buttons of my controller that were originally intended to be software gear changes. (We were also trapped by small balls stuck under our frame.)
• Shooting a small ball across the entire field. Even though we couldn't actually put it in a tube, we figured we might as well test the mechanism in production.

We came away with 2 wins out of 5, which is considerably better than I was expecting. It wasn't a total fail, and we learned what we need to focus on - I think that constitutes a success.