Well its the start of week five, CAD is feeling the pressure, the whole team is waiting on them to finish up the robot. Honestly they aren’t too far behind on the robot. Its amazing considering its a team of 4 students and all are first year CAD students.

CAD

We managed to sneak in two design reviews today. It was a challenge for me as I was bouncing between departments trying to keep everyone busy. Hard to make time for a 30 minute discussion, but we did it. The intake and the CDS + temp shooter got a design review today. So maybe that is 3 subsystems? Hah, probably not.

Temp shooter? Ya haven’t heard that mentioned before. Well its week 5 and we don’t have CAD done so our team decided to re scope a little. Well not completely, just for the moment. Some students threw together a temporary shooter that has a fixed hood. The fixed hood is designed to shoot from up close and it mounts to the rest of the CDS where the adjustable hood will someday mount. We ran out of time and need to get a full robot soon, so we scaled back. I’m happy we choose this path, and we set ourselves up in a way that the choice isn’t permanent.

The intake design review found a few easily fixed problems, the problems were fixed by dinner and the part drawings were started. The intake was missing a few pullies, bearings needed to be round instead of hex, and a few shaft collars needed to be added. The part drawings for the intake were created and pushed to Trello by the end of the night.

The CDS had a bit more work to do. The list ended up being 23 items long, but most of them should be easy changes. Hopefully they will release all of the drawings to manufacturing by the end of the night tomorrow.

Programming

Programming spent some time today testing the shooter and tuning PID values for the shooter. We initially had way to high of an I value, which was producing odd behavior, after a bit of tuning we got the constants into a poor but workable spot. PID tuning can be a time sink, you can always seem to make something a bit better. Once we had an “okay” value(okay for testing) we tried to shoot into the goal from 17″ feet away. The manually adjustable hood at its most angled setting was still hitting the ceiling(and not the goal). So we made a tweak in the prototype to increase the angle and we will see what we can hit tomorrow.

We also ran into an issue with the code deploying successfully, but on the driver station still reads “No Robot Code” and the comms light on the roborio stays red. We spent some time trying to diagnose the issue. We don’t know whats causing it, we do know that re imaging the robrio will fix the problem for a while.