Hello Everyone!
Although we were unable to access our shop this week due to the march break, we spent multiple days at 1325’s practice field both tuning autos and allowing our drive team to gain experience. We are extremely thankful for the opportunity to utilise the field and prepare for our event.
Robot Reveal:
Although, we previously shared our robot name, we would like to formally introduce our 2024 Robot, Leto with some official media:
Reveal Video:
Pit Posters:
You can watch us compete at the Humber and Mcmaster events and finally see Leto in action!
Practice Field:
We spent our first few days on the practice field dedicated to drive team. The brown out issue has been seemingly solved by decrease the current limit to the neos of our swerve modules, which despite the predicted loss of acceleration, it was not noticeable and it seemed to mostly eliminate the consistent browning out issue.
We spent time practicing cycles around the field, as well as our endgame strategy of climbing up and down the chain. There were some issues with the gyro that seemed to affect the height and position of some of our shoots (such as shooting way over the speaker) but with quick resets that seemed to solve that small issue. The driver and operator received tips throughout their practice on how to improve their coordination and general tip on scoring and intaking
An example of some of our cycles can be seen here. The issue with the intake is visible as some of the notes either get stuck in the intake or require us to attempt to intake them multiple times.
Autos were also practiced from multiple positions. If tuned properly, we are looking to be achieving a 5 note auto which would place us in a strong position when we get to Humber.
Throughout the practice field we found constant issues with our intake which we tried to address and eliminate as soon as possible.
Intake:
Due to the fact that all of our tests in intaking were done on the shop floor instead of on carpet, there is extra friction involved in the intaking process that we hadn’t accounted for. Because of this throughout the practise field we kept having issues arise with the notes either not intaking properly or in same cases not intaking at all.
What we had found was that the notes were trying to be centered from the wedges and rollers but there wasn’t enough compression on the outer edge to actually move them. This resulted in the notes bunching up on themselves. and if you move the petunias out wider then there is too much grip on the outer edge to center them properly
In order to help solve this issue, the intake underwent a prototyping process where the rollers were getting swapped out for different variations and positions. Eventually we came up across this configuration which allows there to be enough grip on the sides without getting stuck on the wedges, but still have little enough grip on the middle so that the notes doesn’t get stuck on anything
Along with gearing up our intake roller to 4:1, we ended up with this result which is a much improved scenario compared to earlier.
Thank you for reading this weeks update! Our first competition is later this week at Humber College, and we are really excited to finally see our bot in practice! We know its going to be so much fun so be sure to check our our competition recap next week!
