Notes

Day 29 12/4/18



Today we talked about the previous competition in Thief River, and how we thought it went. Well for starters we won the design award, which moves us to at least state. We were all pretty happy about that, and we thought we did ok, and all agree we could’ve done better. Our plan with stacking the caps on the posts kind of fell through, as our alignment with the towers didn’t stay even. We plan to fix that before our competition this weekend. Our launcher was also a flop. We plan to change that in the near future. Other than that we plan to do more driving, as our driver didn’t get much time to practice. With all of that completed, we hope to do well in our tournament at home.





Day 30 12/6/18



Today we worked on trying to get the towers to go up at the same time, and it did not go all that well. With the way the rail pieces are, they have to be aligned very carefully so that the metal sliding piece has minimal friction. When we took them off to realign them, they were very difficult to get back in place. Even the smallest misalignment can throw the rate that it travels off. We tried the best we could to fix it, but it is looking like we won’t be able to stack caps at our next competition. With that aspect of our robot not working, we will have to just park and keep cap control on the ground.









Day 31 12/11/18



Our competition at home went all right. We won the design award again, and we found out that it is also an invite to the National Competition in Omaha Nebraska. We were pretty pumped when we found out, and we plan on attending. We placed mid range out of the forty teams, but didn’t make it to alliance selection. We weren’t all too surprised we didn’t make it, as our lift for the caps wasn’t working. We re-strategized a little bit today on what goals we should have for our robot. At the past two competitions, robots who could shoot balls did much better than robots who could stack caps. We plan to add a launcher soon, and potentially change the way our lift operates.





Day 32 12/13/18



Today we decided to talk more about the lift. At both competitions, we saw robots that could knock the caps off the post faster than robots could put them up. So we are probably going to change our strategy up as for what our initial plan was. We want to be able to shoot, park, and keep cap control on the ground. So, in order for us to do that we are going to drop the idea of going up to place the caps on posts. We also saw that robots were putting caps on the parking platforms, which really messed up some teams trying to park. We plan on doing that, as it is a very effective strategy. With that being said, our lift will only have to go high enough to place the caps on the middle platform. This will make the issue of alignment almost nonexistent.



Day 33 12/18/18



Today we started to change the lift. Since we no longer need the extra carriage to go up, we can take that off. When that was off, we made a separate carriage to hold the claw, which will only move a maximum of around ten inches. Some unforeseen flaws in our planning were that the claw still has to go up a ways to dump the balls we collect. To fix this, we still have the claw going up, but we are adding click sensors to the lift. So now when the lift goes up, it will hit one of the sensors. Let’s put this into perspective: if one arm goes up and the other arm is slacking, the faster arm will hit the sensor first. This will make the faster arm stop going up, and the other arm will continue going up. We will also add some on the bottom to make it go down at the same rate.

Day 34 12/20/18



Today we put the plan into action. With the carriage off from Tuesday, we went straight into shortening the metal slider pieces. After they were cut, we assembled the new carriage for the claw. When that was done, we added the clickers on the bottom. We tested them out and they worked better than we anticipated. We added the clickers on top and tested it to go up and down, and it works well. We added a cap to see if the extra weight would add any hindrance, and it didn’t. We are all feeling confident about how the lift will perform. Now onto the next task: the new launcher. We plan to work on that when we get back from Christmas break, which for us will be around the beginning of January.





Day 35 1/8/19



Today was our first day back from Christmas break. After not having robotics for so long we all had a good idea of what we wanted to get done. We talked about the different styles of launchers, and are debating on either a two-ball catapult or a puncher. Some pros with the two ball launcher are that we could hit the top and mid flags at the same time. Some cons would be that we would have to drive really close to the flags. Now as for the puncher, we can only shoot one ball, but we can launch from farther. We are leaning more towards the puncher, as it shoots in a straight line, rather than an arc. So, we can drive close and hit the middle, and then drive back farther and hit the top flag.





Day 36 1/10/19



Today we made the decision to go with the puncher style launcher. We normally like to be different from everyone else, but we can’t always be different. For the time being, we are going to do a generic pull back puncher. We started by taking a piece of five wide C-Channel and attaching a steel metal slider holster. We then added the green teeth pieces and attached them to the slider. We plan to retract it by taking a gear and shaving some teeth off of it, so that it will pull back and release at the optimal time. We ran out of time today, but next practice we plan to add rubber bands and test it out.









Day 37 1/15/19



Today we finished the launcher. We added the rubber bands that were needed (which was three). After that we threw a motor on the side and tested its power. Surprisingly, one motor did not have the strength to launch it far. So, we have to add a dual motor on the opposite side. We also had the idea to use a power expander specifically for the launcher, which we’ve used in the 2016 game Nothing But Net. It is a great idea to use it specifically for the launcher, as it can drain a lot of power from our robot very quickly. We attached it directly next to the launcher for easy access, and the way we decided to place our batteries on was pretty cool.







Day 38 1/17/19



Today we let the programmers get to work on programming everything for the robot. There wasn’t much that happened other than that. There were a few complications with the programming. For some reason the program just stopped working. We did some research and found that if you just copy the code into a word document, then make a new code tab, and paste the code it fixes it. Not entirely sure why it has any effect on it, but it worked. Once the program was completed, we drove it up and down the platforms with ease. Now all that is left for us to do is add some cosmetics and finish the backboard for the launcher.









Day 39 1/22/19



Today we decided we want to add some cosmetics to our robot to style it up. We want to add an LCD screen, which not only looks nifty but also will have a purpose. We plan to use it to select our autonomous mode depending on what square we start on. After that was fastened onto the robot we got it wired up, which by the way wiring this robot to make it look clean was a nightmare. We plan to get the LCD screen programmed as soon as possible but we ran out of time during today’s practice.















Day 40 1/24/19



Today was pretty much a programming day. The programmers had the robot for the entirety of the practice, and they got things such as the potentiometer calibrated and they fixed some minor errors in the turn code. They also implemented something we call “Tank Drive”. What we do is we partially stall the motors with the differential to make the tracks lock up. Then, when we press forward for drive and backward for turning it will turn on a dime. It is really cool to watch, but the only issue we are having is that if you do it for too long the entire drive motors will have a long time out. Other than that we changed the end of the claw to be able to flip caps rather than having to grasp them and then turn them over. We did this by cutting the two front holes off the claws top C-Channel.

Day 41 1/31/19



Today was our last day before state, seeing as how 1/29/19’s practice was canceled due to the cold temperatures. Today we focused on getting everything state ready by doing things such as: put on the number plates, make sure we stay within the 18”x18”x18” expansion zone, packing everything we will need for when we are there, and also giving the driver a little time to drive beforehand. Once all that was done, we drove the robot to our school’s shop room and sprayed it down with compressed air to make sure all the metal shavings and other blemishes were off the robot. We ended the practice by taking some photos of the finished masterpiece.