Today was one of those days where things just broke.
Installed a Pigeon 2.0 and started getting CAN errors at seemingly random intervals, but only when the robot was moving. After much derping around we found an uninsulated CAN lead that was occasionally shorting against a bit of metal and killing the CAN network.
We got the intake all together, even stuck a 3DP gear on the linear drive (ordering issues for the metal one… woo…) and had some okay luck testing it for a few minutes. Then a poly belt welded itself to a pulley. We swapped the poly belt out for chain only to find out that the NEO550 that had been stalled for some time by the welded poly cord was damaged.
Getting there, slowly, ironing out bugs mostly at the moment.
We also invested time in properly installing our new carpet with tape. Old robots made for great dead-weight to hold the carpet in place while we fussed around.
The scouts named all of their new tablets and are setting up software.
The tablet caddy will be named Appa, and the two QR scanners will be Momo and Hawky.
Our 2023 robot is small.
Cleaned up practice space looks pretty nice now at least!
I hope we can get some decent intake testing videos on Monday.
We are still waiting on ordering/purchasing processes from the school district to get our carbon fiber tubes for the shoulder and arm… but we are planning out and pre-working as many things as we can to make installation quick.
So glad you’re enjoying ScoutingPASS. Have you checked out the new features for this year? We improved our clickable images, added timers and cycle timers, and other various bug fixes and improvements.
Hey, scout from 95 here! ScoutingPASS has been great for us, although we modified and gutted our fork of it a lot to get it to work how we wanted on our old 32-bit iPads. Now that we’ve got nice tablets, we’re working on porting it to an Android app, which we think will work better for our purposes.
I’ve seen some of the new features, and they look neat! We might pull them into our fork once we get some time.
We really appreciate the fact that ScoutingPASS exists! Our scouting was basically nonexistent until last year, and having a pre-made app ready to use was really helpful for getting a scouting program going.
We tried a new intake geometry for about a second, then ripped it all back apart to the MK1 collector design. The rollers were too close and too rigid to intake cones via their flange.
‘Hey, you guys know we have a nice cart you can work on, right?’
‘We like the floor’
And also an intake smash test. The linear slide and drive are super compliant, the operator has to drive the intake out during dramatic acceleration (since it’s open-loop). We did manage to chip one tooth on the PLA+ printed gear, but the mechanism still worked after testing.
We have elected to print versions of all of our superstructure and arm components to work with aluminum tubing while we wait for the carbon tubes. We hope to have that assembled by the end of the week.
What tablets are you using for scouting? We’re looking at using a similar setup, but initially were only going to use phones - but testing scoutingPASS for only one device is definitely easier!
As we are all learning about the maintenance of our newly built robots I think it is useful to re-post info from our 2022 build thread that has low-key been a huge quality of life improvement for us and others. I’ll just give the tl;dr here:
Thanks for reposting this in a short and simple way. This is one of the best quality of life things we have picked up from another team in the past few years.
I highly recommend more teams follow 95’s lead and grease their components this way.
Something that I’ve noticed with roller claws (233 2011, 179/1323 2018, etc) is that adjustabality in prototyping and even in competition is key. Some material can wear off the rollers or something can get knocked out of place so having slotted hole positions for your rollers so they can change position easily is very useful
Nice new carpet! My team has actually been thinking about getting carpet this year to practice on for the first time; where did you guys source it? Is there any advice you’d give us?
Local off-season/leftover competition carpet is the best bet. We have gotten a close approximation at HD before, but it didn’t hold up all that well.
Secure it with carpet tape underneath and gaffer tape around the perimeter. Don’t install carpet pad if you can avoid it, the competition doesn’t use that.
Vacuum often, before dirt is showing.
Painters tape to mark the field is nice because it isn’t too permanent.
Thank you for the tip! Would I just reach out to a local competition and see if they have any carpet left over from last year (is it as simple as that )
Painters tape works on the cheap, but isn’t the most durable. Would recomend teams invest in some gaffers tape for laying out the field if they can. It’s durable and meant for just such an application.
More likely a team who runs an off-season near you, or the competition committee can point you to who took the carpet. Some teams stock up for offseasons and to hold them for teams who can’t take the carpet right from the competition venue. If a local team/he is hosting they may still have it of course.
I was trying to remember where I learned this tip and it must have been from 95s old build blog. We found you can use food injector for it. They are fairly cheap and easy to pick up at any grocery store.
Let’s talk about intakes! Well, at least our intake.
We had hoped to be able to knock over an upright cone with the intake and collect it by running ‘cone mode’ while the rollers came back across the cone. But that didn’t work, instead all that happened is this:
Not ideal.
So, we added a motion to the intake. The intake plates float on the collector transmission shaft with two bearings. A polycarbonate spring pack (light gray) pushes the arms down.
The front of the collector arms is supported by a (light blue) roller on each side.
Slots in the arms and (essentially) bosses bolted to the MP face limit the total arm motion.
This should allow the intake to pop up and over cones that we tip over and acquire them. Parts are with the team, ideally getting tested tonight.
ALSO: the carbon fiber tubes are ordered! Annnnd the carbon fiber tube vendor has a two week lead time instead of their posted 2-3 day lead time. So we’re going to start a third design spin of our superstructure parts to work with tubing we can acquire more quickly. Yay…
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