FRC 2010: FIRST Robotics Kickoff - Join the Robotics Revolution!

[Chi Meson]

The Beast is in the Box!

The robots are all in their crates now. Tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb 23) is ship day.

Then we have to wait five weeks for our first competition.

And the robot was never fully working yet!

Luckily they allowed 65 pounds of the robot to be "withheld" from the shipping crate, and that's half of the robot!

So we are going to be finishing our lifting device over the interim.

Now for some sleep.

 

[story645]

And the robot was never fully working yet!

So? That's standard for the robotics competitions I've gone to. Back when I did FIRST (team 1155), almost everybody was working on their robot between rounds. Even when I got to college and did IGVC, there were teams asking around for motors and we were working on our bot in the hotel room. (Crashed that bot into a car in the parking lot during testing.)

 

[ideasrule]

I'm curious: what did you do for autonomous? Because of how things turned out, I was the only person coding autonomous and everything related to it. I wrote out the code in full yesterday and scrambled through today to debug it, working through two spares, the lunch period, a class that the teacher allowed me to skip, and two hours in the evening. I didn't finish; the robot could find a ball and kick it in the right direction given good lighting conditions, but there were still major problems. I was rather disappointed, to be honest.

 

[story645]

the robot could find a ball and kick it in the right direction given good lighting conditions, but there were still major problems.

That sounds really really good for high school level autonomous programming (hell for college level), especially considering you only spent two days on it. Don't beat yourself up over it.

 

[Chi Meson]

Autonomous mode: we are planning to have the robot sit still for 15 seconds and stay out of the way. heh heh.

 

[Integral]

Yep, robot has been shipped. Wheww, now for the regional.

We also shipped with a questionable lift arm, however, we are extremely proud of our kicker. the same concept as Chi's but I had them place a potentiometer encoder on the kicker Axel. Using the joystick we can dial up the strength of our kick, we can boot into zone 1 from zone 3 or putt it into the goal from zone 1.

Being new to the team I believed that our self proclaimed cracker jack programmer was actually a cracker jack programmer. I have come to doubt that now. It seems that he has no idea how to trouble shoot his code. When he runs into a problem he throws up his hands, claims he can't fix it. Logs on to Chief Delphi and spends the next 2 hrs looking for answers. It is not clear that we have vision capabilities or a working autonomous mode.

Good luck to all!

 

[Integral]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0yvEcBL6i4" is our teams entry in the video competition.

 

[ideasrule]

We also shipped with a questionable lift arm, however, we are extremely proud of our kicker. the same concept as Chi's but I had them place a potentiometer encoder on the kicker Axel. Using the joystick we can dial up the strength of our kick, we can boot into zone 1 from zone 3 or putt it into the goal from zone 1.

I have to say that that's extremely good, in terms of accuracy, adjustability, and distance. Our kicker can kick over one and a half zones, and has only two modes, high kick and low kick.

Being new to the team I believed that our self proclaimed cracker jack programmer was actually a cracker jack programmer. I have come to doubt that now. It seems that he has no idea how to trouble shoot his code. When he runs into a problem he throws up his hands, claims he can't fix it. Logs on to Chief Delphi and spends the next 2 hrs looking for answers. It is not clear that we have vision capabilities or a working autonomous mode.

What kind of problems does he go on Chief Delphi for? If they're related to the camera, I wouldn't blame him. I spent a week with another programmer trying to get a live feed on the dashboard. When we finally got something, the feed had a five-second lag. We managed to reduce it to 0.5 seconds, using the most counterintuitive method possible: setting the camera to its best settings. We asked on Chief Delphi two times about how to further reduce lag and, after another week, somebody finally discovered that one graph on the dashboard which didn't do anything was causing all the lag. Removing the graph got rid of all detectable lag.

 

[Chi Meson]

Hey,

My project for the "interim period" is to build a kickass robo-cart. Does anyone have any good input on things to put in, things to avoid? Got pictures of your cart?