It was a blazing fast turn around between Amarillo District Event and leaving for the District Championship event. We had a list of three items to fix, eliminate bounce out, bullet proof climber deploy and adding a retractable intake. The team had an emergency Monday meeting, a large portion of the meeting was spent swapping the gas shocks from a double 22lb shocks to a single 35 pound shock with a shorter stroke. (This wasn’t on the list of planned upgrades or problems to solve).

Other departments were busy working on Monday, CAD created servo mounts and hooks to keep the passive hooks from deploying early. CAD also finished up the back roller to reduce backspin, and the intake winch to retract the intake. Our robot now has 5 winches on it.

After adding the second roller we had to re tune our shooters RPM to make the shot accurate again. We filmed the shooting in slow motion and we have no back spin or even a little front spin sometimes.

The programming team set off to program the retractable intake. They are setting it up so the intake is always retracted and when the driver runs the intake it automatically deploys. When the driver lets go of the intake button the intake will automatically retract. It took the driver a few minutes of practice to get used to it. Initial problems were with running the intake too late and pushing the cargo away during the deploy. Programming also automated the deployment of the main arm winches. First the new servos are rotated to release the passive arms. Then the main arm winch is unspooled at a low rpm until the gas shock starts to lift the arms faster and then the winch unspools as fast as possible. This was working okayish? The climber still failed a few deploys from testing at home.

Next we decided to test the autonomous routines with the new back wheel to make sure they worked still. This caused problems, the kind of problems that keep people in the lab scratching their heads until 2AM until the decision is made and everyone goes home tired and confused. When we ran the four ball autonomous routine the robot was all of suddenly turning towards the right away from the last cargo. The paths looked the same, the code had a pretty major refactor, and it was late, we didn’t get far on solving that problem. The trailer wasn’t even packed and it was supposed to be leaving tomorrow at Noon…