Day 52: Continuing Competition Preparation

Day #9: New Intake

Prototyping

Shooter

Students have made a couple of modifications to the shooter prototype.  An L channel was added, in addition to guide rails.  A pneumatic piston was attached to the shooter to load the frisbees into the shooter wheels.

The goal was to make a shooter that could shoot frisbees both upside down and right side up. After making the modifications and adding the "autoloader" the shots became more consistent (because of the same loading dynamics). However, the upside down shots and the right side up shots were aiming differently. The most significant difference is the flying dynamics. The upside down frisbees were more unpredictable and didn't fly as well.

Students making enhancements to the shooter

Conveyor

Not much was changed on the conveyor.  Upon the completion of the shooter and intake, students will integrate the conveyor design with the two other prototypes.

Conveyor prototype

New Intake

The team took a new route with the design of the intake.  They removed some of the orange polyurathane belts in the process.  A new intake was constructed from the CAD.  Though it works fairly well, the team is working on improving it.  It can't quite take two frisbees at the same, but can still pick them up quickly.  The design is based on the old conveyor prototype and old intake prototype.

At the end of the night, the intake was fully functional and was able to funnel two frisbees into one. It was also able to easily pick up the frisbee from the ground, albeit not as well as was hoped. The intake so far is not fast enough and not consistent enough. More work will be done on it tomorrow.

Building the new intake

Programming

The programmers worked on a Smart Dashboard widget for writing constants and their values to a text file, and uploading them to the robot using FTP.  They first worked on the layout of the widget, and were successful in the writing and clearing functionalities.  However, the programmers still had issues creating an FTPClient object and connecting to the robot.

Dorian Chan programming the Smart Dashboard widget

Students also wrote a Turn Command for use during autonomous mode.  The ScriptedAutoReader was configured to read the word "TURN" as a TurnCommand and appropriately create one.  It seems to work, but the command still requires extensive testing, since the command depends on the gyroscope and the robot was left on the stand.

Richard demonstrating turning in real life

Miscellaneous

The pyramid was fixed.  The top goal of the pyramid was brought down for some adjustments, and then reattached.

Fixing the pyramid goal

Action Items

• Continue work on intake (make it work)

• Make shooter accurate

• Do math, save world

Lab closing time for the night was 2:00 AM

PR Update

Alright guys, here’s the PR update of the week. We’ve now had our two introductory meetings for the freshmen and returning members, and are ecstatic about the results. Seventy five freshmen signed up! Add that to our returning members and we’re going to have a great time this year. Over the next three days, we’re going to have VEX workshops, as well as the first parent meeting in awhile, so make sure you attend those! The VEX workshops are going to be amazingly helpful, and the parent meeting is a great way to stay in the loop. Remember to check your emails and the blog! Communication is key.

Website redesign

As you may have noticed, the Team 254 website has been redesigned significantly. We’ve been working hard on updating it to modern web design standards, improving content, and reorganizing the site to be more logical. We hope that users find the site easier to navigate and more visually pleasing. The team member portal has also been re-created and should be easier to navigate.

We’ve imported most users from the old website, so we recommend trying to log in with your same credentials. If you’re having trouble logging in and cannot request a new password, contact stephen.

We heavily utilized Twitter Bootstrap in the redesign, so the site should display consistently across all modern web browsers. Behind the scenes, we’re running the latest version of WordPress. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us.