Baby's FIRST steps

Well, it happened yesterday, February 2, 2008. Our little robot took it's first steps. Our team was invited to work with another local team in their huge and fabulous facility. They have constructed an entire full size 2008 Overdrive track and we were able to make the final adjustments that allowed our robot to begin moving.

We actually spent several hours in the morning trying to get all the robot transmitters and receivers to work properly then spent a good chunk of time trying to get our joystick to work. We tried several different configurations in software and nothing seemed to produce the results we were looking for. First the robot would go forward and backward as expected, then when we turned right, it would go left and vice-versa. Nothing seemed to work, until we swapped out the new fancy (programmable) joystick, with a standard model. It turned out that the joystick was programmed different than we expected and was not allowing us to properly control the robot. Once this was sorted out, things began to move.

When we started using the standard joystick, it acted normal and we took it off the blocks and let her go. When it took off, it pulled a little to one side, and was not incredibly fast. We quickly coded up a shifting sequence that allowed the driver to shift the gears in the transmissions, and we were able to get a little more performance from the robot. It still isn't terribly fast and still has some handling problems, but we'll start sorting them out this week.

We will again be testing next weekend and hopefully there will be some corrections that I can report. We're very satisfied at this point with what we've accomplished. We're heading into the final days of our build season and there are most certainly going to be some frustrating moments. Look forward to more posts soon as we really begin burning the midnight oil.

Also, check back soon for more pictures.