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Unread 24-04-2008, 01:30
mcf747 mcf747 is offline
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AKA: Matthew Forman
FRC #0190 (Team 190)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Rookie Year: 2008
Location: Worcester, MA
Posts: 66
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Re: Silly Programming screw ups (funny)

2008:

I am hooking up the electrical and working with our programmer to well drive the motors im hooking up.(the two window motors keyed together). Any way we have a button set to automatically shoot the ball out of the arm and then drop the arm to a position where it can pick up a ball again. At our first regional we end up inverting the position of our window motors and go out to another practice match. We start the automatic sequence and bang the arm drives backwards and fold over itself crashing into the back of the robot. We cant figure out what happened but I think it was the recoil from the punch so i tell our drivers to not raise the arm so high when they fire it and in the next match it does the same thing. We put a hard stop, using steel wire, on it as the arm was "pushing" through the stop sensor think this would stop the recoil. We send it back out and it happens again and then i remember that we never reversed the code when we inverted the motors, and the powerful worm drives pushed through our hard stop and the delay was to great from the senors that the arm was already more than half way over when the arm lost its momentum, crashing down anyway due to gravity.

What we learned:
-Two worm drives are no match for a 20G steel cable
-Remember to check code after inverting ANYTHING
-Built a robot so tough it can handle major abuse to cover for the occasional mistake

Matthew
MorTourq 1515