Robotics - Autonomous Time

No builders came to this robotics meeting, which made the extra length of it somewhat pointless. We started by trying to decide what to do for our linear bearings. The original idea was to 3D-print them, and we printed one, a prototype. It works perfectly, but no 3D printer owner in the area is willing to let us mass-produce them (we need at least 35 more) for free and soonish.

One option - which we started using as an experiment - is to use Sculpy, an interesting plastic-clay substance that is squishable until it's baked in an oven, at which point it becomes hard like plastic. The problems with this are that [1] we don't have enough Sculpy to make 35 more of these bearings and [2] we aren't nearly as accurate as a 3D printer, and accuracy is important (on the mm scale).

I started looking for online 3D print shops and discovered Shapeways. We determined that the cheapest material they'll use - sandstone (yes, you read that right, we can make robot parts out of sandstone) - will cost us $150 to print all the parts we need. If we use a decent material like plastic or metal, the price rapidly increases from $210.

We still haven't decided on our plan for that. While everybody else worked on Sculpy and our display board, I started working on our autonomous routine. At the first meet, all we could do was drive down from the ramp and play music. My current goal is to get it detecting the position of the kickstand and kicking it down.

After much testing, tweaking, and robotic destruction of the field, I got a routine starting in the parking zone, moving up to test for Position 3, spinning around, and utterly destroying that kickstand if it is in fact in Position 3. The infrared isn't hooked up to this program yet, but I did modify the tele-op program to play a tone indicating the value returned from the sensor (the angle of the emitter) at the press of a certain button. We did a bunch of driving around to verify that it is in fact working and help me figure out which infrared angles to use in the checks.