Day 1 at Traverse City

We survived our first day at the Traverse City District event. I'm able to access our hotel's wireless Internet, I just had to ask the dude at the front desk for a username and password. So, before I go to bed, here is a quick update of our day.

Luckily we were able to go out before competition started and enter into a practice match. When the game started our robot did nothing. Autonomous mode completed and we had no control over the robot in operator control mode either. Then we all panicked.

All through the build season I'd kept track of all firmware updates we'd done, and the final update to the Driver's Station claimed to be mandatory. They said that they were going to check each team and make sure they were using the correct versions. As it turns out, they didn't check versions and the newest update had problems with their wireless encryption methods. Any team running the newest "mandatory" version, would be a sitting duck for all 2:15 of the match.

We scrambled and figured out the problem and corrected our Driver's Station before competition actually started, but there were many many teams that were sitting ducks for their first and sometimes several matches.

Our first series of matches were awesome. Our drive code worked perfectly and our autonomous modes were working great. We actually scored, with the robot, in autonomous mode. We were the first team at this event to pull this off and this brought a swarm of judges to our pit wanting to talk to our programmers, which they did.

It wasn't until we were well into the day that we lost our first match. One of our alliance partners machines was not functioning much at all and they were the sitting duck and got scored on severely.

Our second loss came late in the day, when a lot of teams were realizing that they needed to block us a lot in order to have any chance. Our next and final match we once again dominated.

We ended the day with a 5-2 record, placing us in 6th place out of 38 teams. We have a few more matches tomorrow morning but the schedule is all messed up due to the fact that they had so much trouble getting the first matches started this morning.

We just finished up a team meeting which we discussed how we will be choosing alliance partners tomorrow. With our continued success we should finish in the top 8 and be picking our partners.

Check my Twitter tomorrow for updates on approximate match times.

Going To Bed

Tomorrow morning we leave and head North to our first competition. We have about a 3 hour bus ride, plus we are stopping for breakfast somewhere along the way. We are shooting to be in Traverse City at about 8:30 am. That means we need to leave here in about 5 hours; not much time for sleep. Anyhow, we'll be able to doze off on the bus, so that's good.

I goofed around today getting my Twitter updates to show on the blog, and finally got it working. It was working yesterday, then I changed it to show the last 10 updates and it quit working. I'm not sure what actually fixed it, but it's fixed now.

I watched a little bit of the webcast from Chicago this afternoon. Lunacy is going to be a slow game, and right now I'm not sure if it will be extremely entertaining. These were just practice rounds, so I'm thinking that it will get a bit more intense as teams discover the nuances of playing the game.

I'm not sure if we'll have Internet access at the competition, but I will be Twittering from my phone all day tomorrow. Hopefully I'll figure out a way to blog tomorrow night.

Time for bed...

Bring it on

We finished our software tweaking tonight and we are definitely ready for competition. We only tweaked a few things and tried to test what we could and everything is working really well. We added a new feature over the past few days that will allow our drive team to hold down a button while in operator control mode, that will allow the robot to run autonomously, track an opponent and score. We are calling it the "heat seeker" function. I am envisioning a situation where the driver will not be able to have a clear view of what is going on on the field, and they'll be able to use this function to score.

Last year I posted updates on my blog while we were at the regional in Milwaukee, WI. This year I will be posting updates, hopefully more often, but I am now on Twitter. Instead of blogging the updates, I'll be Twittering them. My Twitter update is already being fed to my blog. Scroll down a little and look in the right column to find my Twitter Updates. You can also view my Twitter feed at:
https://twitter.com/rogerlsmith

My blog is primarily devoted to my FIRST endeavors, however my Tweets will be about anything I'm doing. No matter, everyone is welcome to follow my Tweets, they just may not always be FIRST related.

Alright Traverse City, this is your first time holding a FIRST event. Team 904 is ready. Bring it on!

Programming

We have just about finished programming and testing all software for this years robot.

We had a few weird results from our switch box over the past few days, but that all seems to be behind us. Here is a picture of our switch box, now to be known as the "Skull Switch".

From 2009 Build Season

We are now working on code that will act like a heat seeking missile. It will track an opponent and score if the driver holds down a unique button on the controller. The thought behind this was simply if the drivers are not able to see what is happening on the field, due to the fact that the field will be packed with robots and trailers, that if the camera can see an opponent, it should be able to score. When we left tonight we were about 90% there.

Tomorrow will be our last night of work before we load it up for this weekend's competition. More tomorrow on how I'll be posting information from our competitions.

Back to Robotics

Re-cap: All Michigan FIRST teams put their competition robot in a huge bag on the day that most teams ship their robot. Michigan now has 7 district events rather than 3 regional events. Michigan teams get to participate in 2 district events for about the same price as a traditional regional. The district events are only 2 days long (no Thursday), thus eliminating costs and time away from school. Teams in Michigan also transport their machine to each event.

To make up for the time most teams have on the Thursday before a competition, Michigan teams have 8 hours to work on their robot during the week before any event in which they are competing. We are competing this weekend, so we used about 2 1/2 hours tonight to make some electrical fixes and programming changes.

We fixed our box of switches that will allow us to select different autonomous modes; it seems to be working well now. We also sorted through a few problems with the gyro and it seems to be working now as well.

We worked on different autonomous modes that will drive different patterns using the gyro as guidance.

Tomorrow we will pull the robot out of its bag again for another 2 or 3 hours and do some more tinkering. We have completed all the necessities and are now working on the gravy projects. More news tomorrow.

Its Oscar Night

Tonight I got involved in watching the Academy Awards, which is something I never do. The show just ended and I have nothing "FIRSTy" on my mind to write about and during the show I asked my kids what I could blog about tonight and they told me to write about the Oscars. So...

I like movies, but rarely do I get overly excited about anything Hollywood is making these days. I did see a few movies this year and I did get excited about 2 of them; The Dark Knight and Slumdog Millionaire. I was kind of interested in seeing how well they'd do at harvesting them Oscars.

Actually, I thought The Dark Knight was a little lame, but I fell in love with The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger. I'm not going into details about the movie, go see it if you want to know more. In one word, The Joker was AMAZING!

I just saw Slumdog Millionaire a few weeks ago and I really fell in love with everything there is about this movie. The story was unique, the cinematography was beautiful, the music was outstanding and they just won about 8 Oscars to prove it.

Tomorrow we'll be taking the robot out of the bag and beginning our 8 hours of prep time before our first competition on Friday. I'll have more FIRST news tomorrow.

A Slow Day in Michigan

I spent most of the day today watching it snow. It seems like that should be done by now.

Anyhow, when our team last met, we discussed ways of scouting other teams and marketing our team. I think we've decided that we're going to do a lot of pit scouting and gather as much info as possible from each team. At the same time we are going to give each team a business card with all of our information on it.

Scouting can be done a couple different ways. Pit scouting is just that, we approach and interview each team and ask them about their strong and weak points. Of course it may be possible that teams exaggerate their abilities slightly and we want to back up their claims through match scouting. We want to watch each team in action and try and verify all the claims they made during our interviews.

Scouting is important for teams that feel they have a chance of finishing qualifications in the top 8. The top 8 teams get to pick who their alliance partners will be, and if you don't know the team(s) that can best help your team, you may not win.

We feel that we have a really good chance of landing in the top 8 this year and we are taking scouting very seriously.

So, today, while I watched it snow, I started laying out our business card that we'll be giving to teams. What I did was just a suggestion and I will be letting our marketing team make additions and changes.

5 days till Lunacy begins.

FIRST Article in Popular Mechanics

The Popular Mechanics website popularmechanics.com posted this article a few days ago. It was interesting to see more pictures of robots built for this year. Popular Mechanics focused mainly on FIRST Robotics Competition Team 354 - The Pirates.

The article brought up a subject of huge debate this year; wheels. Since all teams have to use the same wheels, is it better to use more or less? From the article-

This posed a new challenge for the Pirates, who were accustomed to engineering robots that could tear across a carpeted surface. “At first, we weren’t sure how many wheels to put on it,” said senior Jason Lewis, the team captain. “But there’s not that much you can do [to gain traction], unless you make some crazy braking mechanism. If you add eight wheels it’s not going to increase your friction. It’s just more wheels slipping, more weight and battery power being drawn.”

I know a lot of teachers were talking physics about this question, and the science seems to make sense. But it was also a gut feeling from our team that the more wheels turning on the floor, the better traction we'd have.

In our preliminary tests, I think our team got it right. We have quite a bit of traction, and couple that with our software implementation of traction control, I think we have the right combination.

The article also mentioned that The Pirates went with a shooter style design -

Instead, Lewis sketched out a robot that could effectively score points without moving much—a design that transferred from paper to parts largely unaltered. The robot employs a rotating turret capable of launching seven moon rocks in only four seconds, with a maximum distance of nearly four feet. A series of conveyor belts inside the robot suck moon rocks into a vertical shaft, which is capped with a rapidly spinning wheel that the Pirates simply call “the shooter.”

At this point it's difficult to know if a shooter or dumper will be the better design. It was our philosophy that a shooter would be not nearly accurate enough to score in these small trailers. Time will tell, in about a week.

Our first competition starts a week from today. Stay connected to my blog, I'll be micro-blogging during the matches to keep you updated on our status.

Chairman's Award - videos?

I think today was the deadline for the Chairman's Award submission. Each year our team writes an essay about all the things we've done for FIRST, our community and FIRST in our community. I believe the written essay needed to be submitted today.

During the competition our students will give a presentation to the judges and highlight areas of the essay. The judges will interview the students on their knowledge of our team, FIRST in general and different areas of our robot. The essay and interview are used to determine who will win the most prestigious award that FIRST bestows.

About 2 years ago, when I first got involved in FIRST, we went through this process of putting together all the good that we'd done, so that we could present it to FIRST.

Later that season, as part of the 2007 President's Circle, I thought it would be awesome for teams to make videos out of their Chairman's Award and post them on the Internet. I also had this idea to start a website and post lots of videos that would help spread the word of FIRST. I figured these videos would include a lot of the same content that went into team's Chairman's Award videos. I am running this site, it's called FIRST Objective. You should check it out if you haven't.

So, now 2 years later, FIRST is requiring teams submitting entries for the Chairman's Award to also submit a video... Huh... wonder where they got that idea???

Anyhow, you can see our President's Circle video at this link. Also, FIRST sent me an invitation to be a part of the 2007 President's Circle after watching our video. Upon our acceptance, we were never contacted again. I suspect it was because we did this independent of any existing FRC team. But really, is this Gracious Professionalism?

Poll Results

My latest poll asked:

Are robotics teams in snowy regions at a disadvantage during build season?

And with 2 hours left to vote the results are this:
83% Yes
0% No
16% I don't know

The reason that I asked this is because when school is closed due to bad weather, we are not able to work on our robot. Our build site is at the school and when school is closed, everything is closed. Last year we had several days where school was closed due to snow and ice, and it was looking like it might be the same this year, however it hasn't been much of a factor yet. Even taking away a few days of build time is a big deal when time is short to begin with.

In the past I've seen videos of teams outside in the sun and working in shorts and I've often thought that they have a slight advantage to teams that have to trudge though deep snow just to get to their build site.

Tonight in Grand Rapids Michigan, it looks like a little more snow, but I don't think it will be enough to cause problems for tomorrow. Tomorrow we will be meeting again to discuss our Chairman's Award submission and begin working on all the other things I mentioned last night.

Ship Date - Today!

Today ends the six week build season and by now I think most teams have dropped their wrenches and have shipped or bagged their machines. We bagged ours last night; see my previous post for more details.

So you might be thinking that we are done for a while. Not really. We still have a ton of things to do before our first competition. We need to determine how we are going to scout other teams. I think this is the one thing that I like best about FIRST. Not one single team ends up the winner, but an alliance of 3 teams wins. The winning alliance will be "built" by one of the top 8 teams at the end of qualifications. Each of the top 8 teams gets to select 2 other teams that they feel will best help them get to the winners circle. That means that each team needs to know EVERYTHING about every team that is competing. We need to understand each teams strong points as well as their weak points and we need to try and build relationships with teams that we feel best complete our mission. Scouting is how we accomplish this, and this year it will be a challenge.

We need to make buttons, loads and loads of buttons. Every team gives away buttons and we need to make hundreds of them.

We also need to decide how we are going to display our pit area. The pit area is where we work on the robot during competition, but it is also our showroom for when other teams and judges approach us. It HAS to look sweet!

Our first competition is in a week and a half, so we still have lots of things to do. Check back here every day for updates and stories.

We Bagged It

Tonight was our last full 3 hour session to work on our robot during build season. The rules state that all Michigan teams, competing in the FIRST in Michigan district events, must bag up their robot by 5pm EST, Tuesday February 17, 2009. None of us felt that it made any sense to wait and try to bag it tomorrow, so we did it tonight.

In our Kit of Parts, we got this huge plastic bag and a special kind of "zip tie" so that we can lock up the robot when our time is up. We have an independent person sign and verify that we've locked up the robot and we keep a log from now on, that shows every time we unlock and re-lock the robot.

From 2009 Build Season

This may seem rather goofy, but FIRST is rooted in honesty and "Gracious Professionalism" and this method is much more economical than shipping the robot in a huge wooden crate. We're playing by the rules and trust that all other Michigan teams are too.

From 2009 Build Season

Tonight we mounted the gyro on the robot and wrote some code to turn a specific number of degrees. We didn't get it all working, but I think we can before our first event.

In a true FIRST regional event, teams have a full day on Thursday to test and tweak their machines. A new change with FIRST in Michigan, to save teams money, is that the Thursday tweak day no longer exists. This saves teams money, especially when they have to travel and pay for hotel rooms for the team on Thursday night. So, to keep things even, FIRST in Michigan is allowing us to "un-bag" our robots for up to a total of 8 hours during the week of any district event in which we are competing.

We are competing in the first week of competitions, so we have a total of 8 hours we can test and tweak next week. I think we have plenty of time to sort out the last few quirks.

Website Entered Into Competition

This week was a busy week as we are quickly approaching the end of build season and there are also certain submissions that needed to be made this week. Our team website was due this week, and we've completed the submission to contest the best website award.

The websites are judged based on current information and explanations of FIRST and this years game. The judges also take into consideration how the site works, if there are broken links or incorrect information.

If you haven't checked out our team's website in a while, I suggest you take a look:
http://www.creston904.com

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

More Pictures

Today was awesome! Our team was invited by Team 74- Holland C.H.A.O.S to do some testing today on their (almost) full size field. They invited a lot of local teams and there were at least a dozen teams with robots there today. I took a few pictures, and have a few updates.

Here is our robot with Team 2771 - Code Red Robotics right behind us. I'm not sure what we've run into in this picture, in fact I don't recall seeing this on the field at all...

From 2009 Build Season

Here is another picture of our robot with Code Red, before many of the other teams showed up.

From 2009 Build Season

Here is another shot of our robot.

From 2009 Build Season

Our drive team was looking to score on this robot, sorry I don't have a team or number associated with this one. If anyone knows this robot/team, please post a comment. Their robot had a really cool shooter on top.

From 2009 Build Season

This was an action shot right before we attempted a score.

From 2009 Build Season

We were successful in getting our color tracking autonomous mode working. We were even able to get the sonar working so we have a real good idea of when we are in scoring range. It turned out that when we moved the sonar to a different analog input on the digital side-car, it began giving us correct data. After I left today's practice, our robot did successfully dump at the right time in our color tracking autonomous mode.

Monday we will be fixing a couple switches on the robot that we've wired up incorrectly. These switches allow us to select our autonomous mode for the match. We may attempt a last minute effort to configure our gyro so that other autonomous modes would be able to turn a specific number of degrees. The last thing we'll do on Monday is put the robot in it's shipping bag and lock it up. Apparently it needs to be locked up by Tuesday at 5pm, and we don't think that we'll have any time to work during the day on Tuesday.

Last, but not least I want to thank Team 74 for inviting us to practice at their site today. It was awesome to be out there with so many teams! Thank you Holland C.H.A.O.S!!

4 Days to Go

We're getting down to the end now; we only have one more day to drive (tomorrow) and we probably won't be able to do a lot of programming either. We did have some success tonight.

The color tracking code is working better; I'm really curious how it behaves on a real field and in different lighting conditions. Our switches for selecting autonomous modes is working, with a few issues. We have 4 functioning switches that will allow us to select up to 16 distinct "plays" to run while the computer is controlling the robot. I don't think we'll end up with that many, but it always safe to have the option. Our sonar sensor seemed to be working, at least better than last time. Last time we tried it, the sensor crashed the software. Tonight, the sonar was working; giving us data, but it didn't seem like the data was correct. Sensing the distance we are away from the opponent's trailer will be crucial in order for us to score.

I wish we still had about 4 weeks to tinker with the different sensors and ways of implementing them, but our deadline is quickly approaching. At this point a year ago, most of our drive code worked, and we had never even attempted to test any autonomous modes. We are in a little better situation this year. :)

5 Days to Go

We spent another 3 hours at our friend's build site this evening. Code Red Team 2771 invited us back tonight and we couldn't refuse the opportunity to practice on their floor.

I was hoping to have a little more time to sort out some of the programming issues we are facing, but our time tonight was mostly devoted to driver practice. However, we did change how some of the controls work so that it is more user-friendly for the drives.

Our drive team got in some good practice and they're looking stronger and communicating better every time they drive. They're consistently dumping loads of "moon rocks" into moving trailers and their maneuvering skills are quite good.

Tomorrow night we are meeting at the school, and this will probably be the last night of intense programming. I think we are going to devote tomorrow entirely to working out our issues with selecting different autonomous modes, and our problems that have recently arisen in our color tracking code. We're also now having problems reading our sonar. I'm hoping tomorrow I can report that all of those issues are behind us.

We've Updated our Hardware

I've been reading items online regarding a mandatory update to the Driver Station and cRIO. It was not explained well at all, and it took me a little digging to figure out exactly what we needed to do. Our team is programming in C/C++ with Wind River and we haven't been too concerned with updates to LabVIEW, but this was the missing piece.

I found the Driver Station update from the FIRST website, but couldn't find the new image for the cRIO. It turns out that running the LabVIEW update, installs the necessary zip file that can be used with the LabVIEW tool that updates the cRIO image.

Tonight we updated both the Driver Station and the cRIO and were able to take advantage of the new feature of being able to dispaly custom information on the Driver Station. Sweet!! This all worked great, so with a little time left we decided to debug some of the quirks in our color tracking code. Time ended up running out with little progress on the color tracking code.

Tomorrow we will be meeting with our friends from Team 2771 - Code Red (yes that is a link to their website, I just found it - check it out, they've done a nice job). Tomorrow we hope to test our sonar for stopping in autonomous as well as our switches for selecting a specific autonomous mode. We should also be able to have our drive team practice quite a bit too.

Thank You Code Red

Our plan for today was to meet at the school and finish a few things and then for the rest of the week, we'd meet at our friend's build site. Our friends, Team 2771 - Code Red have a great facility and we met there a couple times a week or two ago.

Turns out that the school lost power this afternoon and canceled all evening activities. So we decided to meet at Code Red's site and put in some time testing the robot.

From 2009 Build Season

We got in a lot of drive practice and even practiced dumping moon rocks into a moving trailer.

From 2009 Build Season

Here are some interesting statistics I noticed tonight:

• On average we would pick up about 6 moon rocks before attempting a dump. Typically we'd score about 5 of the 6 moon rocks.
• Our traction control code allows us to accelerate about 25% faster than without.
• Scoring with a "power-dumper" on a moving target isn't as difficult as we thought.
  

Tomorrow night we will be tweaking our controls for selecting autonomous modes as well a the code that controls our autonomous modes.

At this point I think we have completed all essential items for our robot to be "competition ready", and we still have a week to play with it! Sweet!!!

We have put a video of our robot on a new YouTube site: http://www.YouTube.com/creston904 More videos will be added soon.

Overall Progress

For the past few weeks my blog has been focused on our robot and preparing for competition. Tonight I'm going to broaden my scope and visit all the different areas of our team. Every FIRST team is run like a business and a business needs more than just people designing and making stuff.

Our team has a marketing group, and it is their responsibility to be the public relations for our team. They talk to businesses for sponsorship, as well as other teams during the competition. Our marketing team is working on our Chairman's Award presentation (which is the highest and most prestigious award in FIRST). They are also making a video that will be used to tell FIRST, and the world, what our team has done to promote FIRST in our community.

We also have a web development team, and they are tasked with giving our team an online presence. The web team is still hard at work taking pictures and writing content for our site. You can see our site (and their work) at: http://www.creston904.com.

The build team is making their final changes to our 2009 competition robot. We've had some issues with the moon rocks getting lodged together in the hopper, but I'm confident that they will have those issues worked out in the next week.

I've been keeping you updated on the programming and electrical team, and we are starting to work much closer with the build team to make sure all functionality gets tested and tweaked. Tonight we finished working through issues related with our operator controls, a mechanism to engage and disengage our traction control system and our hook assembly to hold an "empty cell". The empty cell is a game piece that can be turned into a high-scoring game piece if used correctly.

A lot of teams will also have a CAD team, that designs all the parts for the robot. From the start our team didn't have the support to use CAD to design all the parts this year. Also, there are teams that creates a 3D animation on a given topic and this was another area where our team was weak and it looks like this may not get finished before the deadline.

All in all our team is making good progress and I'm happy with what we've accomplished. We have another week to tie up all the loose ends. No problem! :)

Pictures From Yesterday

I did take a few pictures yesterday while we were in Holland. I decided to wait and post them today when I knew there wouldn't be much to write about. Actually, I left my phone upstairs last night and at blog time I was too lazy to go get it and upload these pictures.

The first picture is of our robot dumping into a trailer. Notice the platform is tilted down and there are lots of balls (moon rocks) in the trailer.

From 2009 Build Season

This was during some drive practice. I'm very please with our robots handling capabilities.

From 2009 Build Season

This is a close up; the robot was powered down due to a dead battery.

From 2009 Build Season

Our Trip to Holland

First off, I want to thank Team 74 from Holland for letting us use their facilities today to test our robot. They have a fantastic place to build and test, and it was really nice of them to let us have some time on their field.

When I arrived at their building, I was told that our robot was having problems and that nothing worked. Our first assumption was that some wire(s) jiggled out of place on the trip over. We went through all the electronics and everything looked correct.

One of our mentors suggested loading old software on the robot, since we made modifications yesterday and hadn't really had time to test everything. They did, and the old code worked, but didn't have any of the features that we had been working on for the past few weeks.

They began removing code, by turning it into comments, so that our new code would begin to run properly. Once problems have been isolated the code could be "un-commented" so that it would work again.

We were there for 5 hours today, and I really can't say that we accomplished anything, other than fix things that we thought already worked. I suppose if these were problems that we would have faced next week, it was good to resolve them today.

Our drive team did get a good deal of time on the controls today, and I think they're getting a good feel for the robot. I'm very impressed with their driving skills; this was one of the only highlights to the day.

Our Software is Almost Complete

Tonight we were starting to run out of things that we need to work on for the software that will control our robot. We're at a point where we have a lot of things to test, and our timing is perfect. Tomorrow we will be packing up and going out to the beautiful city of Holland Michigan where Team 74 Holland C.H.A.O.S. is letting us test, tweak and drive on their full size field.

Our drive team will be able to practice maneuvers and test handling, while the programming team will be testing and tweaking our autonomous code as well as our traction control code. We should also be able to get practice throwing the balls over the wall and into the trailer.

Tomorrow I should have a lot more to write about, and maybe a picture or two.

Traction Control Really Gets Us Going

We had a real successful night of programming tonight. I think we stunned a few of the adult mentors and really excited some of the students that hadn't really seen what we have been working on for the past 5 weeks.

We had the robot on a slippery tiled floor and spent a good part of our time tweaking our traction control code. We wrote some simple code that was intended to "ramp-up" the speed of the drive motors in the event the driver mashed the stick all the way forward or backwards. In past tests if the driver did this, the wheels would spin and it took the robot a lot of time to get moving.

After our tweaking, the code was running great. We even did some tests to try to make the robot lose traction. 2 students and 2 mentors, all sitting in chairs with wheels on them, arranged themselves in front of the robot, such that when the robot started to move they would all get pushed forward. Our robot was able to start off, never slipping a wheel, and pushed all 4 people and chairs across the room. Score 1 for the programming team.

For our next trick we tried our camera code in one of our autonomous modes. We modified the code so that the robot, once it found the target, would drive towards and follow the target. I think this one left a few of the adults speechless. We enabled the robot in autonomous mode and the servos fired and centered the camera. It began panning, back and forth, then as soon as it spotted the target, it began driving towards the target and as the target moved the robot adjusted accordingly and kept following it. This was very cool; score another for the programming team!

We've come a long way in a short amount of time, but we cannot get over confident. We still have a lot of loose ends to tie up. Our deadline is approaching and we need to keep our noses to the grindstone.

13 days to go

We've selected 2 students that will be our primary robot drivers for this year. We will be making this announcement at tomorrow's full team meeting. We also discussed our travel plans for our first competition in Traverse City at the end of the month.

Tonight we finished up the simple acceleration ramp-up code, and will probably try it on the robot tomorrow, if we have enough time. We're still making good progress, I just wish it was a little quicker.

We haven't had any of the "week 5 gotchas" like we had last year, although last year most of our problems were related to the gyro. This year the gyro isn't going to be as important in our autonomous strategies.

Driver's Training, part II

Tonight we went back to the same facility that were were in on Saturday. There were 4 more students that wanted to try their hand at robot driving; they were not able to make it on Saturday.

We ran the same series of driving tests with these students and now have a complete detailed description of each of the 10 drivers abilities. Tomorrow we will be meeting again and selecting the 2 students that will represent Team 904 as pilot and co-pilot. We will be holding another set of try-outs for the human player, aka "Payload Specialist" real soon.

Our gyro and accelerometer are now wired up and are ready to be mounted on the robot chassis. Since the floor of the playing field, "the crater" will be low friction, we are trying to come up with a traction control method that uses the accelerometer that will reduce wheel slippage. Tonight we experimented with using a simple ramp-up algorithm on the drive motors, which may prove to be sufficient.

Two weeks from now is the build deadline. All teams will need to box up their robots and ship them out, except for Michigan teams. Two weeks from tonight we will be putting our robot in a large baggy and sealing it shut until our first competition. This saves on shipping costs and Michigan teams sure need all the cost savings we can get.

Two Weeks to Go

There isn't a lot new to write about tonight. We had our standard 3 hour meeting and within that time the mentors had a private meeting where we discussed the drive team members. There were a few students that expressed interest in driving the robot that were not able to be at either our video game tournament or the drivers practice on Saturday. We decided we'd give the few extras a fair chance tomorrow evening, and we'd make our final decision shortly thereafter.

About all we accomplished tonight was read data from the sonar or ultrasonic sensor. This little device blasts out lots of high frequency sound waves. If the sound waves bounce off something and return to the sensor it will output a voltage that represents how far away the object is from which the sound waves bounced. We hope to use this device in conjunction with our camera to give the robot an indication of the distance to our opponent.

Tomorrow we will be wiring up our gyro and accelerometer and hopefully getting some useful information from both.

Super Bowl Sunday

I'm not much of a football fan, and I'd guess that there are others like me out there. I did watch the football game this evening and really didn't care who won. In these situations I usually root for the underdog, and I almost thought my team was going to win.

It's kinda silly, all the celebration, production and good old fashioned hoopla that went into a single game. Big deal, we now know the best group of knuckleheads that can carry, throw, and kick a ball. What's worse is that people idolize these guys. When I say people I mean adults, and I'm sure somewhere there is a kid that thinks this is how they should act in order to make their parents proud.

There was a time that pure brute strength showed the ability to survive, but today brute strength is no longer a necessity. In order for us, as a species, to continue to survive, there are a lot of problems that we need to solve.

One day the problem solvers will rule the world. There will be contests where the best problem solvers come together and battle each other and thousands of people will cheer for the winners (and losers). By the way, that day is coming soon. The best problem solvers are working diligently, right now, and will be playing their games in less than 4 weeks. Their sport is known as FIRST Robotics Competition, and their "Super Bowl" will be held April 16-18 in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. Yes, this is a big deal.