Day #31: Field Assembly

Practice Field Assembly

Without a doubt, the highlight of the day was the arrival of the official field pieces. Students spent much of the night organizing the many parts that arrived at the lab today and assembling the field elements themselves. The pyramids were the first objects completed, with both pyramids being fully assembled by around 6 pm. Between completion of the pyramids and dinnertime, students worked together to unpack and sort various field components, as well as cleaning up miscellaneous parts lying around in the lab to make way for the new arrivals. After dinner, the whole team got right back to work putting together the goals, the trusses they rest on, and the corner feeder stations and low goals. Due to size constraints, we will have only 2 of the 4 corner feeder stations, and the goals will need to be mounted in a unique way. The netting will be assembled at a later date. The field is very large, but also really unique and cool. We are excited to have the official setup and will begin practicing as soon our robot’s shooter and climber are functional.

Programming

Though the field assembly was the main job of the night, other tasks were being worked on as well. The programming team began the night by working on fixing the Cheesy Drive code to address the issues that had been discovered the night before. The deadband value of 0.1 was found to be too high, so it was reduced to 0.02, a value judged to be more reasonable given deadband values from prior years. An investigation is currently ongoing into what is causing a strange drive bug where rapidly switching from full forward throttle to full backward throttle causes the robot to exhibit unusual “jumpiness” while on low battery. Finally, work continued on finishing a graphing system for the Smart Dashboard.

CAD

Students and mentors continued work on finalizing the CAD. Currently the intake has been finalized, and the conveyer and shooter are close to being complete. The climbing mechanism position has been determined, but mounting is still being finalized.

Machining

Students used the mill to make aluminum angles to mount the wooden bumper segments together. Once the wood segments are complete we can assemble the bumpers.

Students also used the lathe to make shafts with snap ring grooves for the conveyer. These will be used with the Polyurethane Tubes and mounted once we finish machining the rest of the superstructure.

Action Items

• Complete field assembly
• Contnue investigation on Cheesy Drive
• Finish grapher for Smart Dashboard
• Continue machining parts for the superstructure
• Finalize the CAD of the converyer, shooter, and climber