ship day!

it's officially ship day... ack!

today we tested and debugged... we still need to do a LOT of testing, especially autonomous. we now have 3 autonomous codes. one literally does nothing, to make sure we don't sabotage our own alliance, one is from the right position, and one's from the left. sophia helped us make a dongle that you plug into the dig i/os.

ramp code has been modified to release when both side buttons and the trigger are pressed to insure less accidental release. there is a wingtimer to make sure flipper only goes halfway.

the limit switch works. now we might add another one to stop at the second spider arm.

driving. we can't really drive straight. and we don't know why. it sort of goes in circles. and speaking of circles, erm, the robot... jumps? when you spin too quickly.

paly came over and used our rack and we realized that if we are aligned with robots that have really low clearance, they might just fold up our ramps, not drive up them...

wiring is sort of ugly, but low priority.

we learned by experience the importance of the kill switch being easily accessible. it now is.

there's a very long list of stuff to be done tomorrow before crating.

that's all i remember. vacuum idea has been abandoned due to weight resistrictions.

sunday and non-programming news

alright so the p/e team has been doing a lot of non-programming things. mostly experimenting with the vacuum idea.

we know that if we attach a wide nozzle to the end of the shop vac that used to be in the project room it works really well to pick up the tubes and place them on the rack. now we just have to modify it to use the motors we are given by FIRST. doug and steve helped us to modify the fan and parts of the shop vac that we took to pieces and replace the motor with our own.

if this design works it will be incredibly awesome and really easy to operate from far far away. just suck up, lift arm, reverse motor.

tomorrow we will write vacuum code.

doug left some edge deflect (?) stuff in a notebook with julia. neither julia nor i have any idea what it's talking about but it has something to do with limit switches. jessa knows what they are.

we are meeting at 10 tomorrow.

stores do not sell vacuum attachments separately.

we are hooking up this vacuum thing at the end of the arm (if it works. we need to test it to see, and if it does, GREAT! if it doesn't, we always have the old arm to fall back on)

after erin and mary left, we tested the ramp code with the actual ramps, and it works! julia/jimmy/build/everyone is concerned that the driver might accidently hit those buttons during competition and that would screw stuff up badly. if it's simple and foolproof, we might want to add a timer or a switch or something to the code so that you CAN'T release the ramps before you want to. we can talk about that tomorrow.

to do:

mount limit switches
TEST CODE
-autonomous
-arm
-everything
write vacuum code
clean up wiring
hook up arm and ramps

we need to remember to bring the right terminal box to ideo.

that's all i remember about now.

proggggggress. fri.

WE HAVE AUTONOMOUS. THAT'S RIGHT.

OHHHHHTONOMOUS

and it works. yeah. it's basically go forward. turn. we need to make the turn bigger. then it's fwd back fwd back. eric came and helped us make a really really easy loop. it's one line of code. YAY.

we might want to shorten the wires on the electronics board.

mary re-soldered the limit switches. we made pretty diagrams. they're in GENERAL.

yeah.

i'm exhausted.

we are all crazy.

karlin ate.

mary's a juicy ninja.

caroline has a wet nose

metamorphisis

that's about it. so far.

AUTONOMOUS. YEAH.

thurs

karlin and erin and sherri and alecia and caroline were here today.

we talked about limit switches... there will be some sort of block on the gear for the arm, and the limit switch and some metal (caroline and i bent metal and drilled holes) on the tower frame. the block might just be made out of an eraser, we haven't really decided yet.

AUTONOMOUS CODE HAS BEEN STARTED. yes. timers and good stuff like that. no interrupts necessary! we think! now we have to code the if timer is between x and y do lgoweiutpreoiuw. aka the real code. basically forward. turn. forward. back. fwd. back. repeat the fwd. back.

the robot has wings. it's pretty awesome. it still needs a name. we want to fly. soon.

build is going to make some sort of adjustable crossbar for the back of the tower.

our electronics cover has been cut and mounted with velcro. it's great.

someone really needs to solder the good limit switch back together. both of the them (where's the other one?!) need to get mounted and make it work.

WE REALLY NEED TO GET DONE WITH EVERYTHING TOMORROW. REALLY.

we didn't forcefeed karlin today. progress has been made. =)

that's about all i can remember. general is our notebook from now on.

the backed up code is on emily.

you need to hook up the oi if you want printf values. don't forget.

yeah.

gnite.

wednesday

caroline and jessa (and sherri) modified arm code so that there are two speeds

erin and mary did some wire management

caroline and sherri went to ideo, and mounted the electronics board. there was other random bulid stuff to help with so that build could then help us w/ crossbraces for limit switches.

we were planning on attaching to the limit switches to crossbraces on the tower... however, with the new arm design that programmers have yet to see, the arm will probably not be touching the tower in the front. we had the idea before to attach protuding bit from the gear and then limit switches, but were afraid of having two switches hitting each other and ugliness. jimmy suggests just having different radii which might work. the other limit switch could be attached from the tower, but build/jimmy thinks that we need flappy bits of metal so we don't get crunch. because that would be ugly.

current idea:

*limit switch for the front on the gear itself
*for the back on the tower

however, because we only have a prototype + it was 10 we decided to deal with it tomorrow. also we wanted to make sure it wouldn't screw anything else up.

there is a list of stuff in the GENERAL notebook for programming. that's our notebook now.

electronics covers need to be dealt with. they have been designed and are made out of the board material.

ribs go in the wrong direction for the board... but it's not worth changing (says everyone besides rockman)

yeah. sorry if i forgot anything - just look in GENERAL. the dogeared page.

chrissy now has the best picture ever of caroline. =)

Schedule for this week

Tues:

rewire (somewhat done)
hack mount board (done)
(joystick board)
wings
arm working (the motor spun, but no arm to test with)
fix limit switch code (done)
wire (done... the robot drove)
fix deadband (done)
order potientiometer

Wed:

get real arm working
mount limit switch
arm sensor (potentiometer/GTS)
real mount board

Thurs:

wings - fly!

Fri:

autonomous - defense

Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues:

TEST!
PRACTICE!

tuesday + DRIVING ROBOT!

hello!

so. the robot ships a week from today. that's the scary/AHHH FREAK OUT NOW news. however, the robot drives. the way we want it to. there were some issues, we flipped some cables, some wires. it's all good now; things were just wired badly.

one issue we haven't looked into yet is the fact that when you stop the joystick/bring it back to center, there is a lag in one of the motors, causing it to turn in that direction. apparently, this is a known issue in the master code (?) for this year, so hopefully there is a simple solution.

jessa explained interrupts to us and tomorrow we are going to dive into the details.

we have a schedule that we have all (aka those of us who were there when we agreed: sherri, mary, erin) agreed to stick to for the remainder of this week, regardless of whether judy/karlin/jessa can be with us. we completed everything that we physically could from today's list. we couldn't debug wing/arm code since we don't HAVE wings/arm connected.

there was some wiring, soldering, clampsmushing, ziptying and other lovely things while we had the robot. the electronics cover goes on top of the board, so zip ties need to go UNDER it.

the robot needs a name. badly.

and the dolly has sharp edges... don't ram into it.

we need to have EVERYTHING done by friday so sat/sun/mon/tues is TESTESTESTESTEST. PRACTICEPRACTICEPRACTICE.

we also need to/already did change the deadbands for making driving more intuitive and less really-big-deadband-and-then-it-jumps-crazy.

yay! IT MOVES. IT'S ALIVE. IT NEEDS A NAME.

this week's schedule

from judy's email:

Tuesday 3:30-7 PM- Judy 5-7, Jessa 3:30-7

Wednesday 3-7 PM- Jessa 3-5, Judy 5-7

Thursday 3:30-7 PM- Karlin 3:30-7, Jessa 3:30-5 or 5-7

Friday 3-7 PM- Judy 3-7, Karlin 5-7

(Saturday) <-- might meet depending on how things go

Sunday 11-3 PM- JJ&K 11-3


from me:


*i will be around school tomorrow (monday) after school anyway, so if there's anything (ie wiring) that needs to be done, i can do it.

*also: judy showed erin how to back up on the USB stick and why that's important. so basically, every night before we leave we should save that day's code in it's own folder. that way, if we do anything drastically bad, we have some code to fall back on.

*if we could get the new tape in the label maker that would be great... currently we are using blue tape and a sharpie, which works too.

sunday

so on friday we got the new board material to lighten up the robot... it's pretty much just air with some plastic partitions, but we have been assured that it is strong. so we had to move everything from one board to the other and drilling and washers and such stuff. but finally we had an assembled board and then today we checked that everything worked. that one speed controller is still finicky, but should be okay. we can switch it out if necessary.

we went to ideo and tested the arm code and started to lengthen the transmission leads because they are too short and realized (again) that one of the radios is finicky but then i think we changed the cable and it was okay. the arm code works and erin and caroline were changing the code so that you could move the arm again if it hits the switch.

we did some other stuff too but that's about all i remember. build was punching some serious holes into that metal and it was pretty cool to watch. we are cutting our wire length as much as possible because every little bit of wire is a little bit of weight we cut back on! =)

wed + thurs

quick recap of wednesday: we stayed till 9, got the board all wired up and functional and lovely. tues night judy and karlin went to the los altos team and got us a 40 amp circuit breaker which is gold and shiny. we did drilling and wire cutting and clamp smushing and all sorts of lovely things. the board was functioning... we attached motors to make sure all of our wiring was functional and stuff downloaded and it was good.

thurs: instead of squashing the tether cable in there, we figured out how to attach the radios, so now we are sending signals more like we will in the actual competition. we (aka sherri) learned about debouncing limit switches and got thoroughly confused. but anyhow, we knew what we had to do and mary soldered and put together the circuit for our other limit switch. erin didn't freak out too much when we saw the board, but wants it to be prettier. build is going to put a potientometer on the arm so that the yet-t0-be-decided driver has distinct analog values and it just makes coding so much easier. yeah.

we talked about SUPER-SCARY autonomous. two major types - defense and offense. our defense strategy is pretty much just to go at an angle, turn, forward, back, forward back, until 15 sec is up. unfortunately we are going to have to use a timer. offense: go straight/angled for x seconds, hang keeper. (We hope!)

and that's my condensed, what-i-can-remember-in-my-stressed-out-state version of the week.

2/6/07

Today Erin was sick, so we weren't really sure what to do. Karlin came and we make marks for screws and drilled holes that actually fit what we were trying to attach to the board. All the speed controllers, the RC, one of the breaker panels, and the main switch were all attached to the board. Los Altos' team is willing to give us their old 40 amp circuit breaker.


* We need 12 gauge black wire.

*We have too much energy. (*alecia commenting on the group*) We also cut the 12 gauge red wires that will be connected to the speed controllers and the circuit breaker.

So yes. We did wiring and drilling and assembling, and that's just about it. We actually drilled the holes in the right spots which was very good. =)

And that's just about it. Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive, remember, we meet at 5!


-Sherri

Schedule + Deadlines!

From Caroline's email:

-Tuesday: 3:15-7 (some people are going to Los Altos to talk about the 40 amp circuit breaker panel. Erin will send details)
-Wednesday: 5-8 (wiring and mounting done)
-Thursday: 3:15-7
-Friday: 3-7ish (driving by today)
-Sunday: 12-4 (arm running)

Sunday

Hello all

Today we started assembling electronics. We had more mentors than programmers, which is always nice. Jessa and Eric came first. We looked at the board and speed controllers and talked about methods of attaching them. I won't bore you with the details, but Jessa went to Ace and got us some screws and nylon washers. Drilling holes and other such nice stuff that made us feel like we were on build. We found the large box of screws we had been looking for. Caroline wrote/modified/added code for another limit switch, while Erin and Sherri assembled electronics. Or rather, Erin drilled holes and Sherri attempted to strip wire. She's learning. Slowly. ;)

We talked about autonomous. We possibly might use a GTS, we're not sure. Autonomous is very scary. No camera though. Camera is wayyy too hard with 2 weeks left. We went down to the cafeteria and looked at the Rack and took the arm and talked strategy. We didn't really come up with one, but it is going to be really hard to program this thing to do it in autonomous. And the driver (Does anyone know who is driving??) better be very very good to move the joystick jusssttt enough to drop the tube.

Also, sensors. What are we using? No camera. Maybe GTS, otherwise, how on EARTH do we get autonomous working? Potientometer, for the arm? So driver knows how far to move etc etc?

While looking through some stuff online, Jessa found a diagram of "suggested circuits" or something like that. Those funny looking plastic things? We may be required to use them. Do we know what they do/why we would need them? No. We looked online and couldn't find anything. We're really hoping Emily/SOMEBODY knows... These are odd looking black and red plastic things with some metal in them. Jessa, Judy, and Karlin all have no idea what they are. If I remember right, FIRST called them terminal blocks, I think. ????

And finally, Eric took the broken speed controllers home to see if anything can be done to the many we managed to short/break.

Oh, right. In order to get rid of dead weight, we might cut the end of our polycarb electronics board off, because the only thing on that end of it was the main switch, which can be easily moved. However, with our scary weird plastic puzzle pieces... Who knows?

That's all I can remember.

Board + more functional code!

Hey

Quick summary of today: We got the switch for the arm code working. It turned out we were using the wrong variable because it originally set the value to ALWAYS be 1. So nothing happened/it always happened (I can't remember). We changed the variable, code works, yayness. Then Mary and drew an outline/diagram of the electronics board with to-size drawings and labels and it's hella cool. If slightly messy. We know where all the precious gold 2007 stuff is. And that, in a (very) short form, was our evening! It was a shortened meeting because Judy and Karlin came at 5:30.