We entered the Wednesday (March 4th) before competition with high hopes for extensive drive time and few other errors. However, as it always happens, we were able to get very little drive time and instead had various issues to deal with.
Most prominent of the issues was our climber. Initially, the soldering connections on the motors for the climber (two 775s) were breaking off. After trying to fix them for a good while, we finally realized that the problem would keep occurring and instead just replaced both motors entirely. With that problem “fixed,” we continued to test the climb and, very quickly, we realized that it wasn’t even near being able to climb. We spent a little while trying to diagnose the problem and fix it but ultimately, we were not able to figure out a solution on Wednesday. With load-in just a few hours away, we were able to work on reducing the friction in the elevator system (by drilling out the bushings holding the lead screw and by making sure the two sides were in-sync and level) and get the elevator to move more freely. We tested it and it somehow worked. After about at least 4 hours of work on fixing the friction in the elevator system, it seemed to be smooth and powerful enough to lift the robot quickly and effifiently.
Apart from the climb, we also had one of our intake motors burn out and start smoking and we had to replace it the next day. This continued to be a problem during competition but you can see more on that in the Del Mar Regional blog post.
Despite what it may seem, Wednesday was not all trouble. We were able to get our shooting consistency and accuracy higher and we were also able to pre-inspect the robot. This led us to realizing part of our bumper attachment wasn’t legal and a quick fix was executed that same day. At the same time, we got to weigh the robot (for the first time after changing the plates on the shooter) and it came out underweight with a little bit of wiggle room.
After fixing these problems we did one final systems check right before we went to load-in. Everything worked as we wanted it and we were ready for competition.
Team 2658 Blog 