1/21/17
All of our blood and sweat that went into our robot over the past few weeks is finally being tested next Saturday at the Ellis Davis Field House in Dallas, Texas for our team's FTC QWualifier. This means that all the team members had to put their hands on deck and work together to get the bot ready to go for competition. Despite the crazy Texas weather that we faced, we are almost there.
We were just about to test our robot but sadly the crazy weather destroyed our practice field. This made us very diappointed and we realized that we needed a mew way to test the robot on a more stable surface. That is why, over the past week, the first thing we did was set up a temporary practice field. After 2 hours of hard work, we ended up with the field seen below.
Next, we worked on the permanent field with our sister team Imperial Robotics. We converted the old pool into the new location for the field. After a few hours, we were almost done.
Meanwhile, we stripped our robot to fix our wiring. We realized that we needed a better wiring plan than the one we had previously been using as the old design was very disorganized. We realized that we could fix this by placing a polycarbonate sheet on the side of the bot then mount everything to it. By doing this, every wire would be organized and would not interfere with the ball trajectory. Although there was the potential issue that if a robot hit our the wiring would come loose, we fixed this by safely mounting the PDM and Motr/servo controllers closer to the center of the bot. We ended up with the following.
The next issue that was adressed was the autonomous code. A lot of our work was guess and check because we needed to know exactly the distance to travel and exactly the power to shoot it at. After 4 hrs of testing, fixing, and repeating, we were able to end up with a beta version of our program shown below.
In this week, we want to make a 2nd autonomous that will hit all the beacons. We were color sensing through the phone's front camera so to prep for this we mounted the phone to the front of the robot.
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The final thing that we worked on was successfully shooting. The issue that we kept running into was that the flywheel was not consitent in the location of where it was shooting. We realized that this was because the rubber bands that we placed on the flywheels were bumpy in texture. We fized this by ensuring there was only one band per each space. Also, we realized that the servo was innacurate in the way it gripped the ball. Because sometimes it would go in the hole and other times it wouldn't, the ball would not fly the same location. Also, the power of the flywheel was changing based on the time the flywheel was on. This was very problematic because this meant that the robot would not be efficint. We fized this by adding a second layer of rubberbands on the wheels as seen below
Although we lost a low of time today because of the rain/hail, we were able to get a lot done. We hope that we are able to win qualifiers because of all the hardwork our team set into building the robot. Our long journey has one of the climaxes of our long journey on Saturday. And we hope to make the best of it
Written by: Abhijit Bhattaru