Its a Sunday today and the start of spring break was on Friday so attendance is doubly light. We had a few students in working on code, the competition branch is getting more usable. Issues were put up to fix incorrect current limiting on the drive base, incorrect setting open loop ramp rate on all motors, the CDS stopper wheel doesn’t spin while intake is running, the arcade drive is missing a .85 multiplier. These are all easy things to fix and shouldn’t take too much time. The CDS ball management code was worked on for a little bit today, its looking much better but its lacking any serious run time on the robot. So we are not sure if it is stable enough to run at competition.

We tried to add a second camera to the lime light today. That was an exercise in frustration. The second camera feed randomly drops and we don’t have any insight on the limelight to see whats going wrong. As a backup we are working on adding a camera server running on the rio.

The rest of the day spent doing driver practice and running some autonomous modes. The 2 cargo mode is working pretty consistently, we still need to modify the starting location to make it easier to setup. Driver practice is paying off, we are running out of things to break on the robot. The new one for today is the climber end plugs. They are 3D printed parts that brace the climber, we broke the first set by running into the low bar with the climber up, the second set winching them down too tightly. I’m reprinting the pieces as I write this with 5 line wall count and 20% infill so it should be significantly stronger. If those break we will probably make the piece out of HDPE.

Our driver is able to consistently score 17 cargo into the upper hub during a 2:15 match. Add the two cargo from auto and we are one away from the ranking point. That’s pretty okay. We are playing on a 70% width field and a 60% length field. So not perfect. Also not playing with any other robots at the moment. But we are only playing with 4 cargo of the correct color to better emulate actual game play of chasing/finding cargo. That number will go down on a field with 5 other robots, some of the other robots will be getting in the way, or chasing the cargo you want. It will also be pretty hard to see where the cargo is located. I plan on having our human player do hand signals to signal any cargo over 2 on the far side of the field. We will have a camera so we should be able to drive back there and intake cargo decently.