End of Week 2

Next week we all have finals, so no one will be working on the robot until Wednesday afternoon. That being said, a small group of us managed to come in today and finish up some stuff before we have to take a break. We now have a drive train set up with encoders so that our programmers can get to work on programming some PID. We also finished up our prototype grabber, which works great, but is far too long (30+ inches). At the moment we have one pneumatic that performs two functions on the grabber, so we're going to replace that with two pneumatics, which should decrease the stroke lengths/pneumatics lengths.

One of our minibots went up the tower in under 10 seconds, with actual speeds being between ~5 and ~7 seconds, counting a little deployment time. The actual deployment mechanism will change that, but I have confidence that we should make it up the tower in under 10 seconds. At the moment, we're unsure about how to get the minibot down (we aren't using the NXT). We also thought a little more about the elevator, and then decided to leave it for Wednesday.

Where We Are Now

So, here's the state of the robot at the moment, AFAIK; we're using pneumatics to power a grabber that applies pressure to the inside of intertubes to pick them up. We're going to use some sort of elevator, possibly something that telescopes up, which might be pneumatically powered or run with a couple of window motors. This is all balanced on top of a 6 wheel drive train with 2 sticky middle wheels, and 4 outer omni wheels.

Electrical Stuff

At this point, we have a small electrical board so that the programmers can get to work. Today I soldered the new router to the dc-dc adapter and set that up, so we're now legally able to connect to the robot as is. Now I just need to replace the Victors with Jags and wire up some solenoids and this board will be good to go.

FTC State Championship

Our FTC Team 3860 competed yesterday in the Washington State FTC Championship. When it came time for alliance selection, we were seeded third and became the captain of the third alliance. We selected teams 245 and 4054, and although we didn't make it to the finals, we are very proud of how well we did.

BPSEP also had a huge number of volunteers staffing the event, with both students and mentors doing things such as field reset, field tech assistance, queuing, filming, reffing, and scorekeeping. Our alumni were also volunteering, including field tech management, AV support (courtesy of A Plus LLC) and announcing.

We now transition back from FTC to FRC, with a bonus Monday free of school, and full of prototyping, testing, and brainstorming.