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Thanks for all the posts regarding our bot.
All the kids and mentors worked very hard on making this design work! Imagine, how many other teams have both a vertical AND horizontal drive system?? We start on two inline drive wheels and two inline free wheels (vertical position) then our double-hinge allows us to transition during the autonomous mode to SIX inline drive wheels across a TEN-foot span (horizontal).
By the beginning of week 6 we had hacked-up and re-welded our robot frame about 5 times and had autonomous code tweaked and working great, but due to a minor weight problem and a few more mods, we were forced to change some hardware.
On Thursday, we spent time trying to tweak the autonomous codes to match the playing field and the added mods, but we encountered two major problems.
1. For some reason, the 2 switches we setup on joystick port #4 to select starting position (L/R) and play mode were no longer being read by the robot controller during startup and autonomous mode (worked fine during 6 week build period) - so we were forced to load the play before the match.
2. Our horizontal drive motors were running intermittantly and had to be changed out late Thursday.
So, we used Friday to finish tweaking the auto codes during the actual matches. I would watch the match with the laptop/code in front of me and make note where changes needed to be made and our greatest asset, Dan (mentor-mechanical designer extraordinaire) would tell me how much to tweak it.
Saturday went better, but impossible to make up score-wise.
Guaranteed we'll have our codes ready for Finals and with a few new moves. Look out for that ten foot evil grinning wedge and be very careful when driving over us at high speeds!!
Look forward to seeing and competing with everyone in Houston.
BTW, it was match number 72 when we finally nailed the code and autonomous mode worked PERFECTLY!!
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