Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

No the robot is just happy that after build tonight its going to Tim Hortons.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Where's the Chief Delphi "like" button?

Be right back, getting a large double double from the timmies around the corner.

-Nick

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Oh, why do you taunt me so? Here I am stuck in Texas with no Timmy's to be found for over a thousand miles...

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Looks good! Very elegant PTO setup.

I've got a tin of coffee in my pantry and shipping to Texas is only $10.35 via Canada Post. The offer is out there!

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Michigan has Timmy's Of course, we drive South to go to Canada...;)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I'm in Texas too. The last time we flew out of Vancouver, we bought a big box of TimBits from the Tim Hortons in the Departure Lounge. My wife (from Toronto) and I debated auctioning them off, individually, during the flight since it would be a long time before many of the other passengers would be able to get their fix again. We ended up eating them all ourselves :D

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Krispy Kreme > Tim Hortons.

And it's not even close.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Where did you get the air tank holder? On another note, great looking drive train!! Looks really clean.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Maine has them too. Here in Washington I have to drive up across the border to BC for an iced cap. If it wasn't for border patrol getting super suspicious of going through all that hassle for a beverage I'd do it more often. (The Canadians understand though)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I think it is just a battery tester :)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

For a more relevant question... How is the new 2CAN working for you, and CANbus in general, so far in 2013?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I'm not 610 but I can tell you that 79 hasn't had any problems with either the 2CAN or the CANbus in general this year. The only major problem we have is that our electrical team has a nasty habit of pull Jags off the bus that we still talk to and it introduces a stutter into the system. Despite our best efforts we have not been able to rectify this problem (the electrical team removing Jags, the stutter is fixed by not writing to that Jag).

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Well, another Saturday in the books. Figured I'd post a quick response before a night-time Timmie's run...

I can't really comment about the drivetrain, other than the fact that I really like it, and that student designer Ryan Tam (Gr. 11) deserves a tons of recognition for the design and manufacture of it. He worked under the mentorship of Mr. Stehlik, and there are a lot of neat little details in it that just don't show up in this picture... (i.e. all 4 side plates are identical, how the square channels are securely connected to the side plates with only one fastener, the in-between CIM "floating" encoders + mounts)

It's not flashy, but it's really well thought out, with a ton of detail to maximize ease of machining, assembly, and maintenance.

To answer some questions:

Yes, the smiley is covering something. We noticed one of the frisbee manipulating components got into the picture, and needed to be covered up.

The air tank holder is custom cut 1/4" lexan on our CNC router, again designed by Ryan Tam. It is basically four holes, as the tanks have a nice raised boss at each end that you can support them by.

As for CAN, it worked well for us last year, but we had a few hundred lines of code dedicated to CAN Error Recovery. Without it, we would have been dead in the water. We used the black serial adapter last year, and this is the first year we are using the 2CAN. It's still a bit early to give any meaningful feedback, as all we've done is some light open-loop driving.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Im interested in the CAN Error Recovery stuff. Could you elaborate?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

We coded our robot in Java using the Command-based template.

Within each subsystem that used a Jaguar, we ensured that whenever we caught a CANTimeOutException, we called a subsystem-specific recovery method to re-initialize and verify the configurations of all Jags within that subsystem.

This ended up being a bit tricky for some sub-systems, as we switched Jaguar configurations depending on the task we were doing. i.e. the drivetrain could be in VBus, Position, or Speed mode at different times in the match. We had to keep track of these states, and restore them gracefully.

We had to handle the deadlock condition as well, because sometimes the error recovery would cause more CANTimeoutExceptions if the affected Jag wasn't ready to be re-initialized. Gracefully handling this condition without stopping your entire CAN communications bus was a bit tricky.

At worst we only wanted a single sub-system to "pause" just long enough to gracefully re-initialize the Jaguars after an exception. All the other sub-systems had to keep going as if nothing happened.