Statistics on top 20 teams?

[Joe Ross]

We used LabVIEW. We did most of the work in telop this year, as we didn't have any control loops. Last year, we mostly used telop to set set-points and ran the control loops in periodic tasks (separate thread).

Our autonomous was structured into discrete VIs that had their own while loop in each one running from autonomous independent. We could then string these VIs together very much like lego programming. For example, we had a drive until ball detected, followed by a kick, followed by drive until ball detected in parallel with wait for 2 second kick retract. It was very easy to move those around as needed.

We had no problems with WPILib. We used Jaguars for most things with PWM control. Programming computers were team supplied.

The only sensor we used in competition was an analog current sensor on our ball herder to detect when a ball was captured. We played with the vision system and had it tracking at home, but didn't have a chance to integrate it into the rest of our code. We used the tracking part without modification, but changed the auto-aiming to fit the rest of the structure of our code.

We had 4 wheel, 4 CIM motor drive, with two pneumatic tires and 2 omni-wheels. Frame was aluminum tube, welded. Almost all fabrication was manual. Kicker was completely pneumatic using a pre-charged cylinder. We did hang, from the top bar There are no wenches on our team or robot (no winches either). We used a lead screw powered by a CIM to hang. We had a single powered roller on top, and an un-powered roller on the bottom that the ball spun against.

We did a custom LabVIEW dashboard, but we only used a little for debugging, and not really in a match. We only used the kit joysticks. After having problems with the provided hub during build season, we bought our own USB hub. We did not use the cypress.

Most of the problems that I helped other teams with were with loose wires, so make sure everything is tight, and that you periodically check your wires, especially in a high impact game like breakaway.