Day #5: Continued Prototyping
Today was a very productive day at the lab. There was a lot of progress made in many areas.
Prototyping
Shooter Prototype
Improvements were made to the shooter prototype. After students replaced a faulty CIM motor, an adjustable base was added to the linear shooter to allow testing at multiple angles. This base will help optimize the perfect angle for shooting a frisbee. The base was constructed out of kitbot parts and 80-20 extrusion.
Richard assisting students with the adjustable shooter platform assembly
Intake Prototype
Students worked on improving the roller-intake prototype by testing different kinds of tread spinning at different speeds. It was found (unsurprisingly) that the roller must be spinning very quickly (about 2,000 RPM) to intake the frisbee. Long rough-top tread attached as "fingers" did not work well. A piece of rough-top tread that was wrapped around the roller worked the best.
After determining this improved treading configuration, students and mentors worked on setting up the prototype as an over-the-bumper intake. Rather than sucking-in the frisbee horizontally, tests were conducted to see if the frisbee could make a smooth and easy transition from a horizontal position on the ground to an angled position over the bumper.
Updated Intake prototype
Restoring the 2010 drivebase
Students continued to attempt to restore the 2010 drive base, in order to attach prototypes and drive around. After an hour of debugging, it was concluded that a faulty cRIO was on the robot. The efforts were abandoned because of a lack of replacement cRIO. Hopefully, a new cRIO is acquired soon in order to continue testing.
Restoring the drivebase was also supposed to be an excercise for the new programmers, so they could practice writing brand new code and uploading it to a functioning robot.
Programming
Tom dropped some knowledge bombs on the programmers today.
Constants
Students continued to brainstorm and discuss possible ways of updating values without having to re-compile or re-deploy the code. Some ideas that was brought up was having a text file for each constant, or having an "isModified" boolean value somewhere.
Action Item List
An action item specific to programming was created yesterday. This is essentially a to-do list, which organizes and tracks tasks what need to be completed and the priorities of tasks. This list should make it easier for students at the lab to more easily contribute to programming effort.
Miscellaneous
Light Control Box
Two students worked on modeling a project box and the components to go inside it. This project box will house a power supply and will be the control box for the lights hanging on the trussing in the pit area.
Pit Area trussing for banners, lighting, and monitor mounting
A student modeling the project box in SolidWorks.
Action Items for Tomorrow
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Fix the wiring to the cRIO on the 2010 robot; flash new image to cRIO
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Work on and test prototype for intake
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Work on and test linear shooter prototype
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Complete drivetrain design. Deadline is Friday.
Lab closing time was 11:00 pm
