Today was the second meet of the season, and we again didn't hold high hopes for our performance. Work continued on the cardboard ball routing tubes, but we didn't attach the servo to the box because we have no lift. We have no lift because the 3D printer that we left to run last night got jammed and failed to produce the linear bearings. What it did produce was a sheet of flat domino-like things that are entirely useless as any kind of bearing.
While tinkering and messing around, one engineer discovered that a crazy arrangement of screws, nuts, C braces, and a washer performs passably as a linear bearing when a similarly crazy assembly is stuck onto the end of the channels. He worked on putting that together over the course of the meet, but it was never attached.
Our first match (which was also the first match of the night) was a total disaster. Our NXT battery was critically low because the other team needed the full battery (that we had been using) to pass software inspection. They never gave it back to us. Somehow, the simple autonomous program (that just drives forward from the ramp) vanished from the NXT, so we ran the complicated IR-involved one despite starting on the ramp. Since one of the drive motors' wires had gotten loose, the robot turned at the start, falling sideways off the ramp rather than driving down it. It did fully leave the ramp, so we got the points! Unfortunately, that fall knocked out the other motor's cable, rendering us inoperable. Our alliance partner was trying to move the tubes, but without much success. When they tried to climb the ramp, they fell off the side, but since the side of their robot that went off the ramp fell onto our disabled robot, they were fully off the floor and got the points.
It was about this time when we noticed that the real field layout was reversed from our practice field. This inconvenient fact rendered our IR-smart autonomous program entirely useless.
Despite that, we tried using the program in our second match. By sheer luck, it got really close to the kickstand, but missed it. We helped our alliance partner push tubes up the ramp, but our acrylic number plate got jostled loose. One corner fell to the floor and got jammed in the squishy mat, rendering us unable to move forward and only allowing very slow backward movement. We managed to park in the parking zone.
We used that same autonomous routine again to get down from the ramp, and it worked since we had repaired the motor connections. We tried to move the tubes to the ramp, but jammed them all into the corner and also got a big penalty for pushing one through the opposing parking zone. We did extract one tube and started to push it up the ramp. Our robot just barely got up off the floor with a push from the alliance team.
In the fourth round, we just used the stationary musical autonomous program. We pushed several tubes up the ramp and ended the game teetering on the brink with one tube and our robot partially off the flat part of the ramp. The allied team very carefully parked in the parking zone.
Our fifth and final match was a huge jam. The allied team instructed us to play defense, so we did our best to block the opposing alliance from accessing their tubes. A flood of balls and the kicked-down kickstand tripped up our robot, and we got stuck near the opposing tubes. An opposing robot tried to drive through the mess and got stuck on top of one of our front wheels. Neither of us were able to move for the rest of the match.
Our performance here was not great. I think we won only one of our five matches (the second one). We did make some progress on the linear slide system, but our capabilities were largely unchanged from the first meet.
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