Robotics - Ours Moves Too

Next Friday is the first robotics meet of the season in which our teams will compete. We took our last opportunity to have a Saturday practice, and we made some progress.

The engineers continued mounting the ball intake belt. That took a while, but after it, they mounted the NXT and Samantha module. Cable management is a disaster, but it is currently being swept under the rug with zip ties. With all the wheels finally put on a motor and connected to the NXT, I did the programming for a basic driving routine. This was incredibly easy thanks to the tele-op header file I had made for the other team - the main .c file was only five lines of code, plus the "#pragma config" lines for the motors and sensors.

Speaking of motors and sensors configuration in the Robot-C files, I should soon move that chunk of code to a header file. That way, we can change it in one place and affect both the tele-op program and the future autonomous routine. I did already re-arrange the header files in the file system to make this workable. I also wrote up a coding conventions document which will hopefully be followed by the other programmer.

The ball intake belt works fine, but it was mounted too close to the ground to pick up the large balls. That should be easy to adjust next meeting.

The other team also has their ball input mechanism working, plus a place to store the balls. (They almost have a way to get the balls into the tubes.) They are currently waiting for the continuous-rotation servos they ordered to arrive.