Robotics - Final Prep

I got the third incarnation of the Engineering Notebook prepared in one of my study halls today.

Tonight was an extra-long practice, the last before our third and possibly final meet. The lift mechanism, already assembled, was augmented with another slide with a screw hole in it. That was used to re-mount the device in a stronger manner to the robot frame. (It no longer threatens to fall over when extended.)

The engineer did something to the motor and the fishing line (possibly a gear-up, I didn't see) to make the device extend and contract much faster. It actually cut the line and a wire during testing, but the important components have been carefully adjusted (read: trapped with zip ties) to avoid things like that in the future. The line cut was a result of a mistake in threading.

The first challenge was to make it fit inside the 18 inch sizing cube. That required a good deal of filing, finagling, and probably some Dremeling tomorrow (before the matches start). More importantly, we had to figure out a way to put the ball hopper box on the last slide so that the balls could be dropped into the tallest tube. It did get attached via screws, but it still needs a bit of fine-tuning so as to actually drop the balls into the tube.

Tests were performed on the ball hopper servo; it does indeed open and drop the balls. I wrote a rough draft of an autonomous program to come down from the ramp and drop an autonomous ball into the second tube. It has not been tested and probably will miss completely; the timings hard-coded into the program are guesses.

The other team finally started having their own programmer. I gave him my function libraries and the code I had written for his robot before they completely rebuilt it. He successfully reconfigured the motors and has it driving, albeit with strange half-reversed controls.

If we can get our stuff together tomorrow morning, we should do pretty well. The other team also has a lift in place, but they seem to be running into other problems. I will do my best to help them, but sadly I can only code.