We are still waiting for a ton of our plates to get cut on the router. Our manufacturing mentor has been swamped with other stuff. Its clear at this point we need to train up a few other mentors to be able to take over on the router and help out if needed during the off season.

Our manufacturing students ran out of parts that can be made on the manual machines. Some students started assembling some Steam Works gears that we got from first choice. Others disassembled the 2016 robot that only existed as a drive base.

Programming was focused on getting the climber working today. We got 90% of the way there. The climber doesn’t appear to have enough power to climb. Which is odd because the calculations say we should. Its also possible we didn’t tune PID enough because it was only outputting 30% duty cycle on the climber motor controllers. Tomorrow we might just try an open loop control tied to the joystick so we can give it 100% with no tweaking and see if it lifts before we add any reductions. Our plan for the reductions is to slap a 3:1 versa planetary gear box onto the climber.

We managed to get about 50 minutes of driver practice today. The newer 10 degree angle is working really nice. We only got a few minutes for a basic tune but we are already more accurate than we were previously with a much better PID tune. The reason the PID tune changed is amusing to me. It turns out when the shooter was assembled one of the motors didn’t get a key put in, so it was always disconnected mechanically from the system. Adding this wheel back in means we had to re tune all the shooter’s PID values. I think we are at about 80% accuracy with the shooter. It needs to be sped up so it settles faster and recovers faster, that will reduce our overall cycle time. Always able to improve, just gotta find the time to test it all.