We started off the day with some testing. We rewired the climber so that the motors now get 40 amps and that seemed to do the trick. We were able to quickly climb on both the top and bottom hooks and it looks like the climb should be good.
After we finished testing that we worked on the extending pistons that actually bring up the climb to its vertical position. In short, it did not work. As you can see in the video below, the retracting worked fine but the extending just didn’t have enough force to lift the entire climb. We did some quick prototyping with surgical tubing positioned at various spots and a solution was devised that will be implemented once we take apart the tube and rewire the robot (which is set to start Monday after school).
After that, today was mostly a software day filled with lots of errors and issues and for that there isn’t much I can say. I will try to get software to write some bits for the blog later on so we can document some of these lessons but to be completely honest I don’t understand enough of software and haven’t been involved enough in the process to be able to give some in-depth details on what was done there.
Nevertheless, I can give a brief summary. We had some robot communications and spark max problems some of which have been fixed and others which resolved themselves. Other than that a simple “drive forward” autonomous based purely on encoder ticks worked (today they only tried to work out the drivetrain). But, when software tried to implement pathweaver paths, things did not go well. It kind of just kept driving forward and never stopped. Those are the issues we’re having right now and you can see the general problem in the video below. Software will have time to work tomorrow so those will hopefully get resolved.
Looking forward, we have our first competition (and second one right after that) in about a week and a half. Software has a substantial amount of time to work on autonomous and limelight tomorrow. Starting Monday after school we’ll get metal plates to replace the plastic ones we have on the tube, shooter, and intake right now. At the same time, the climber additions will be made and the electrical board will be redone to add some more things. We should finish this “pit stop” of sort around Wednesday. After that some more software time will be needed and then we hope to hand off the robot completely to drive team at that point. There should be bout 5-6 days that are all drive time and, if everything goes according to plan, we should be well-prepped for Del Mar.
Team 2658 Blog 