Yeah, that’s a good idea, we will be looking for materials to replace the plates inside the aluminum frame, we are thinking some other type of plastic as you mentioned, or an aluminum plate with weight reduction, but not really sure about that one. Thanks for the insight!
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All-Star Alliance Invitational at Kettering University
The last couple of weeks we have been practicing with our alliance partners 4635 Botbusters, 3478 Lambot and also our friends from 6017 Cyberius and 6647 Voltec have been helping us practice with defense as the opposing alliance members. We are exited to meet all the teams and alliances that will be attending the event and hope to have a great time.
Software updates
While the mechanics teams has been busy assembling the robot upgrades. Software team has been working on converting our library/base code to use it like a vendor library, while the code is still majorly written for our own bots, we will be working during this offseason to separate the code from our robots so it is more robot/team agnostic. While it will only be available to use with C++, we still want to keep it open for everyone to see or use if they want so here is the URL:
https://overture-7421.github.io/overturelib/OvertureLib.json
Also our repo with the source code:
Also we will be migrating our simulation from ROS to Webots. The decision was made because our ROS system could be only run on Linux computers and most of our members are not really familiar with ROS. So with the hopes that almost every member could run the simulation on their computer if needed, the will be archiving our ROS system.
Here are the links to our Simulation Repositories:
We are also planning to migrate our autonomous paths to Choreo but keep the Path Planner autonomous files, this is still in progress as we did not have time to test it before our next offseason.
NOTE: Don’t apply hot glue directly to your new note detection camera and then remove it, probably wont end well. (We totally did not break a brand new camera like that.)
Robot upgrades
All the robot upgrades have been installed. The last couple of weeks we have testing our new front frame design and so far it has been holding up. We took advantage of the practice with our AllStar alliance partners and our friends from 6017 and 6647 to really test the frame and up until now it seems like it is really good at taking impacts. We are still taking some PC and extrusion replacements in case it breaks. Also some how the robot ended up around 5 pounds lighter.
Also we were able to try out our new upgrades and we found out that most of the upgrades are working great for the exception of the intake. We found out that while the only two rollers it had worked well, the note could not go up to the storage and would end up stuck inside the intake. We ended up adding two extra dead axle rollers to drive up the note so it got into the storage. It ended up working a lot better than we expected.
Kettering All-Star Offseason recap coming later this week
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All-Star Alliance Invitational at Kettering University
A little bit of a late post but here it is. About a month ago we attended the All-Star Alliance Invitational at Kettering University with our Mexican alliance partners Botbusters 4635 and Lambot 3478. We ended up ranking 7th after qualifications and got eliminated on Eighth-Finals after a tie-breaker match.
Fails and Improvements
- Our support arms were not staying in place during the matches causing them to stick out of the robot for a good part of matches. The support arms ended up getting hit and broken.
The Fix: Designed a new release mechanism to keep them from releasing on impact.
- Our batteries were not lasting a whole match causing burnouts on the last 20-30 seconds and also got disconnected a couple of times.
The Fix: Applied some more current limits during competition, which did not really help, until a couple days ago we lowered rate of change of the acceleration in our Slew Rate Limiter to 2/3 of the original value.
- Radio Power Module had a short/was damaged which caused us to disconnect a couple of times.
The Fix: Replaced the Radio Power Module with another one and fix some cabling issues that could cause it to keep restarting.
What we learned?
- Our hybrid frame does indeed work and is better at receiving impacts than the pure aluminum frame we previously used. It did not break during the whole competition.
- We need more practice against defense as the double feeder strategy is easily shut down.
What next?
We are coming back to The Remix in Texas this year and some of our Mexican friends are coming along this year. We are excited to see all the amazing teams that are also coming back this year.
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The hybrid frame design has been interesting to follow. I’d be interested on seeing more documentation about it. Would you feel comfortable using it on a future season robot?