Week 4-5 Updates - 2/15/2024
Overview:
We’ve made a lot of progress in the past 2 weeks, including some iterations on our V1 robot build. Our programmers have begun working with the robot to tune all of our subsystems! Time is relative until you start counting days until our first competition, so let’s try and catch up a bit.
Wiring:
The big wire up was this week, only took about 9 hours of work for a robot with 17 motors and a bunch of other low power devices and sensors. We use these knockoff WAGO CAN connectors with Andymark ferrules on the ends for most of our CAN and Low Power applications. Big thing with these is to use a hexagonal ferrule crimper, they are so much more consistent than the cheapo square ones you find all over Amazon. We’re still using Anderson’s for our motor connections, we have some inline WAGO’s that Rev sells for some items and for emergencies, from testing we just prefer to take the time to use Andersons over them for general use. We’ve been using these two sets of connectors for years at this point and they work really well.
We’ve actually had to retackle wire management twice already to add more devices, definitely going to need a third after vision is added onboard later this week
We have developed this System Documentation sheet which originally was used just for electrical but we’ve expanded it since to be used for documenting part manufacturing and chain lengths. The electrical documentation works by making a large list of everything plugged in on the robot and assigning it to slots. We’re also pretty aggressive about labels this year which is awesome, but in general this helps keep everything straight between electrical and programming. We’ve been using this system the past few years and it has worked for us.
Intake/Transition:
We’ve been debugging our intake and transition to the point where notes are getting picked up and ‘indexed’ pretty consistently which is awesome as that is usually our pain point. Note come up through our undertaker into the belted transition which has 2 TOF sensors on it from Playing with Fusion. These are used to tell where the note is exactly in the transition so it can be automatically adjusted with code. This was one of the earlier versions of that logic, its currently a lot less dramatic but this shows the process of centering pretty well.
Some things we’ve noticed are that notes get super stuck to polycarbonate, but slide really well against wood and nylon. We noticed this during prototyping, we even had some very classy wood veneer on our robot for a minute there before we realized nylon worked just as well. We’re still messing around with adding nylon centering fins so notes don’t get stuck on the NEO and various bolt heads, but minor tweaking at this point is a-ok with us.
Older version of it with the wood veneer peeking out
Shooter:
We started running our V1 shooter at an advocacy event and noticed the Vortex’s were getting super hot. Turns out we just had a ton of friction from the chains driving it, so we ended up making the call to just go hard into a V2. We should have that assembled today so we can show that off Saturday.
Climber:
We got off the ground for the first time this week! We are still in super early development on this setup, but because our climber arms have 2 sets of elastic, we can control which goes up/down first based off the amount of spring force each joint has. Less spring force, it moves first as the path of least resistance. We’re working on a number of big tweaks to this system right now to require less human babysitting, hoping to have it working well enough to try at our scrimmage on Sunday, but it is doing the things we hoped it would so we’re overall pretty happy with it right now.
Bumpers:
Normally bumpers are a 1 Saturday operation for us, this year it’s taken two whole weeks. We’ve been tweaking how we mount them to work with the floating mounting rail system we have (We’ve been loving the rails though, thanks for the idea 3847!). We’ve settled on these polycarb plates bolted to 4 independent bumpers that on 3 sides get bolted to the sides of our mounting rails, and the intake one just has some permanently mounted bolts that get a wing nut on the end similar to our previous bumper system. The intake side one is higher than the rest, trying to prevent notes from getting under us as we drive around.
We used a bit of extra heat transfer vinyl to mark which side is which, quality award here we come
Programming:
We were able to get our intake and transition working together to pick up notes off the ground.
After getting our intake working, we also tuned our transition arm and were able to score for the first time in the amp!
We beefed up the arm joint after this as well, bit less floppy
We have been making steady progress on calibrating cameras, and have been able to reliably detect AprilTags from about 25 feet away. We have also started writing commands to automatically pick up notes and align to the speaker. To test our AprilTag localization, we are creating a custom field layout to fit our practice area.
Moving forward, we are going to begin tuning our shooter to set angles and velocities, then begin working with our climber and trap scoring. We are also looking forward to getting on a full field at the Sussex scrimmage to test our auto paths and vision.
Scrimmage This Sunday!
We’re looking forward to competing in our first formal scrimmage event this Sunday! At this point we know what needs to be fixed and are mostly just fighting the clock. Big focus this week has been keeping our priorities for what needs to be done by the scrimmage in mind. One shot location is fine, we can tune the shooter at home. Climbing on a full field? That we have far less access to so we’re trying to prioritize that more for this week.
On a personal note I think our team in general is being a bit hard on themselves when things don’t work immediately or as quickly as they hoped. The team is doing AMAZING right now and it’ll be exciting to see everyone’s hard work paying off as we get things moving. Going to need to do some accomplishment recognition on Saturday. We compete Week 1, clock’s ticking
Dolly
