Sat. Jan 10, 2009
Programming team - got camera working, started working on vision tracking.
Build team - mounted encoders, mounted cross beam in base, mounted electronics, fixed spacing issue on chains, put chains on all 4 wheels, trailer was worked on, backing for vision target was completed.
CAD team - worked mostly with build team, tomorrow (and this week) will focus on ball sucker-upper and scoring mechanism.
Today's meeting went from 10-2, as the police kicked us out. Terry and I worked on the robot base until 7:00, so it needs some wiring and then it will be drivable very soon.
Tomorrow's meeting will run from 10-4.
Here's a "journal" I've been making to keep track of all our progress although some of the days are very broad. Please provide the missing information & I'll add it to the corresponding dates.
Sun. Jan. 11, 2009
Terry, Art, Brad, Mr. Woodwood, Matt, Mark and ~10 students.
Programming team - got encoders working, continued working on camera.
Build team - finished wiring base, wired batteries, temporariliy wired encoders.
Design team - hashed out the collector and scoring mechanisms - Matt, Mark, Brad and Henry are going to work on drawings for it.
All students present got to drive the robot, we did some fun driving challenges - base seems reasonably responsive to controls. More work has to be done on the default drive code to eliminate stalling (which may have been mostly caused by a dying battery).
(Tammy I posted here for now, if you want I can email you an update for the days I'm there and then you can just add it to the blog.)
Mon, Jan 12, 2009 (programming only)
-Discussed and partially implemented auto-calibrator so we can get new color targets in different lighting conditions
-Calibrated ROBOT_ROOM colorset for the pink and green targets in the robotics room at night
-Fresh colors still didn't work
-Found yet more bugs in WPI code
-Fresh colors started working
-Tested and fixed distance-to-trailer calculation function
Tues, Jan 13, 2009 [programming]
-Worked with camera more to get distance and heading estimates
-Tested robot live on ground to see if it could track the camera (it couldn't, the camera code is too slow)
-Found out what happens to the cRIO when the battery runs out of juice
-Sped up the camera code slightly
-Discussed ways to improve camera tracking via gyros and encoders.
Mon. January 19
(design)
- Met with members of UWRT
- Discussed and finalized plan for the robot
(business)
- List of material sent to Metal Supermarkets
- New sponsorship from CBET (thanks to Matt, Fazlin, Alex, Christian and Jordan)
- 5 batteries, 7 chargers, 3 victors, 3 spikes and 2 Fischer Price motors on loan to us
- 2 toughboxes, 2 2.5" CIMS, some pneumatics and possibly another gearbox getting loaned to us this coming weekend
- Terry got 8 Orbit Balls, 3 more coming this week (total of 13)
(programming)
- Not sure if it was Monday or Tuesday - got the camera actively tracking the target
- properly mounted the camera to have better tracking capabilities
The camera tracking was successful on Saturday.
Monday night for programmers was:
-Drove on regolith for first time
-Burned out motor
-Worked with encoders to get acceleration numbers out of them
-Got simple camera mount made
Tuesday was:
-Got accelerometer soldered, 'mounted'
-Worked with accelerometer, created noise-reducing strategies
-Graphed accelerometer values versus encoder values, debugged
As of Tuesday night, we had the accelerometer and the encoders reporting approximately the same acceleration values when we did a slow robot start. This is required for traction control. I don't know what the guys did on wednesday, but on Thursday we'll be making an effort to actually implement some simple traction control.
Saturday January 24th
Build:
More of the upper frame put together. Got pieces cut from Metal Supermarkets.
Finished trailer hitch.
Set up plastic flooring in gym.
Drove robot with trailer attached on the flooring.