Tonight was our first meeting since we hastily tried to run some tests last week that ended with some wires melting. Refer to Friday's post for more info.
We did more brainstorming about autonomous modes; looks like we'll be wiring up a set of switches on the robot that will enable the drive team to select which autonomous mode the robot will run. We came up with a number of variations we would like to implement, so we may need as many as 4 switches mounted on the robot (that's 16 options for the binary challenged).
We also ran more in-depth tests after our "wire-melting" incident last week, and all checked out well for our hardware.
Lastly tonight, we took our time hooking up the control board to the robot, making sure everything was connected correctly (twice). We taped all PWM cable splices and made sure everything was safe before we even connected the battery. Now, with all of our team watching on, mentors included, they waited to see what the computer geeks had been working on for the past 3 weeks.
We connected the battery, booted up the robot controller, downloaded updated software and rebooted. The robot, now live in autonomous mode, waited for us to switch the system to enabled. Immediately after enabling the robot's computer, it began to scan (pan the camera from left to right and back repeatedly ) until we showed it the pink and green colors it was looking for. As soon as the computer recognized the correct color configuration, the camera stopped and was fixed on it. As the colors moved the camera moved, and as the colors moved out of range the entire robot turned and the camera remained locked on the target. It was awesome! and a little weird all at the same time. It's only weird because the robot's actions seemed quite human. I think we've built something that has a personality...
At any rate, the team was quite pleased with our accomplishments.
We've entered the last half of build season, our robot needs to be completed 3 weeks from tonight. Stay tuned, things will start getting good here real soon.
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