I don’t even remember what day it is at this point, we’ve been in the lab every day for the past week. Looking at the calendar tells me we have one more meeting before we load in at Austin. In the mean time the 3D printers are printing spares, the router will soon be cutting spare parts. Programming will be cutting a release that is hopefully stable. The team is starting to feel like a giant machine that was set in motion and we’ll be “ready” for Austin event on Thursday.

Tonight both robots were done for the start of the night as we completed a bunch of small changes. The intake “v4” from the second robot was swapped over to the competition robot. At the end of driver practice on Monday night the climber Neo went up in smoke during an attempted climb. The motor released the smoke while we were trying to un-spool the rope so there was no load. It was odd, my best theory is that the Neo decided it no longer wanted to live and just gave up at 10 amps(we checked the PDH logs). This motor was replaced, and we replaced the bumper brackets that were bent out of shape from being run without a pin. Then the robots were turned over to programming for the rest of the night.

Programming is working on finalizing autos, we changed the starting location for the 2 cargo autonomous so its easier to line up. Then they were trying to tweak the ending location so we end better centered in the middle of the fender. The other robot was being used for the color sensor integration testing. We have 3 rev robotics color sensors on the robot, we are working to use them to move the cargo to the set positions in the robot, and eject the wrong color cargo. We are having a bit of trouble getting it working perfectly. Right now it works some of the time, sometimes we miss a reading on cargo that we intake.

What does “ready” mean? Well we are bringing a robot to competition, we have completed the items on our priority list for the first competition. Is the software/hardware/electrical/controls/anything I missed perfect? No probably not, there are a lot of small things that we’d like to have done, or implemented, but we have ran out of time. With that said we are going to show up ready to play on Thursday/Friday. Not having to bag the robot means we are going into the event with out a massive to do list for the robot.

We are going to show up, get inspected probably while our pit is still getting setup. I performed a mock inspection last night with a few students and we only have to fix two small issue, our roborio was being powered with a fuse >10 amps(already fixed) and we need to verify the PDH version.

Does “ready” mean done? Nope. After the Austin Event we will have a list of things that we need to fix on the robot to perform better. One of those will be getting the traversal climb on the robot. Another thing will be increasing the accuracy/response of the color sensor/cargo management. In the mean time we have a list of stuff that needs to be finished for Wednesday night so load in goes smoothly on Thursday. The event is being hosted a few minutes away from us. The event wants teams to show up around 3:45 and “hang out and play Frisbee in the field” until load in starts. After a week of robotics every night and going into competition I think an hour or so relaxing in the nice weather is going to be perfect.