Re: Team 95 Hard At Work - 2015
 

Thank you very much! I was pleased with our alliance making it to semi-finals at such a competitive event, thank you 3146 and 173!

The 6x tote pull is a subset of what we've been working on. In theory, though we have yet to execute on the field, (read: take this with a huge grain of salt) we could collect 8-10 totes from the landfill and make two 4-high stacks, a 4-high and a 5-high stack, or (very optimistically) two 5-high stacks. Unfortunately this mechanism is very much secondary to our RC arm and thus is less robust, many things have to work out well to mine this many totes. The best we've done thus far is to pull a 4-stack and a 2-stack and cap both. Still, I consider this is a big step up from our 2x2 mining from GSDE. We're now right at 119.8-120.0lbs, which makes it quite difficult to add any more functionality to the totem! All we can do now is practice and refine code.

Speaking of code and practice, a big thank you to 1519 for helping us with, and inspiring us to implement, an IR sensor array that has been key in making our robot more effective at RC mining. We spent much of our time at Hartford refining the control code for this and practicing using it. Here is a picture of the array installed on our lower-most totem bar. These four sensors allow the robot to automatically square itself to, and center upon, two totes end-on. It has worked well in tele-op, but not as well in auto, yet.



We moved the air cylinders for our 'antennae' to be base of the arm and connect them via fiberglass push-pull rods to the antennae. This moved enough mass down off of the arm to dramatically improve arm performance with the antennae mounted. We also added a small plastic 'wheelie bar' on the front of the robot that lets us pull wheelies routinely when lifting RCs.

Antennae cylinder mounted on the arm shoulder:



Overview shot of the push-rod actuated antennae. The fiberglass push-pull rod is red, the carbon fiber antennae is black.



The geometry for these work, and we've tested it in teleop. We just need a slightly more robust auto code to align properly to grab two RCs in auto. Currently we're brainstorming ways to make this happen.

Re: Team 95 Hard At Work - 2015
 

I forgot to mention the on snafu we had with the IR sensors: the plastic house on them is designed to be shielding, and thus it is conductive. We had to isolate the housings with some VHB from the KOP and then passed inspection. That was a weird issue I had never seen before!

Re: Team 95 Hard At Work - 2015
 

Isn't VHB tape magical?

Re: Team 95 Hard At Work - 2015
 

Glad to keep seeing you guys improving and iterating; we look forward to playing with you guys again at DCMP!

Sorry... forgot to warn about that!

Re: Team 95 Hard At Work - 2015
 

It really is! Though we need to stock up on some rubbing alcohol for our pit. Gotta clean off everything really well for VHB to work to its potential.

We also used VHB and zip-ties to terminate one end of the push-rods on our antennae!

As are we! There isn't another stacker quite like 1519, and no other team (so far) has been able to keep us busy with just capping.

And no worries. It took a little while to fix, but it was a good object lesson to our whole team to not make assumptions! Plastic with carbon is quite conductive.

Re: Team 95 Hard At Work - 2015
 

What happened? I noticed that the division scouting spreadhseet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...hC0/edit#gid=0) had you in Carson, and I got excited, but you weren't on TBA or FIRST's website as attending championships.
I then checked here: (http://frc-districtrankings.usfirst.org/NE), and it seems to say you declined the championship invite!

I was disappointed to hear you weren't coming to champs (and couldn't be a total steal in the 4th round as a capper on an awesome alliance :D).

Re: Team 95 Hard At Work - 2015
 

Lack of money and time happened, unfortunately. :(

Our team is about 13 students, 5 technical mentors, and 4-6 non-technical mentors. None of the three on our programming crew could make St. Louis, I and 3 other technical mentors were out of vacation time, none of the non-technical mentors could make it, and we didn't have the money reserves to put up $5k right away.

We saw this coming several weeks ago, but we had a hard time scraping together registration for District Champs and had no gas in the tank left over to get the $15k we needed for a trip to Worlds! We have lost a significant portion (around 40-50%) of our sponsorship backing since our 2013 season; we're still feeling the sting of the 2013 federal budget sequestration crisis. We are continuing to work hard to expand our sponsor base, but it does take time to develop good sponsor relationships and to recover what we lost.

We hope to make it to worlds again in the next year or two, but it just was not in the cards this year unfortunately.