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.