San Diego
March 6th, 2010
Ok so where to start. . . ? Oh hey, we won! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! But not without some problems. We were pretty much freaking out at the beginning of the weekend. (I lost the game. ) After flying in late on Wednesday, we had all kinds of issues. We destroyed the rope twice in our winch, more importantly the second time, when it ripped apart at the knot. There were continuing problems with our omni-wheels bending, although we found out that they’re not terribly difficult to bend back. Needless to say, that isn’t a perfect solution. At one point, we were leaving to play in one of the Thursday practice rounds, and realized that the battery in our Classmate PC (driver’s station) was dead. Team 359 had a similar problem when we were entering the finals round. Another frightening problem we experienced was tipping over, an obvious issue for the tallest robot in the regional. Now onto the positives! ! ! The kicker was positively dreamy. Other than all of the issues with autonomous, the kicker code (and the kicker itself, of course) worked incredibly well. The only potential problem was when the robot tipped over; the kicker code attempted to keep the kicker up, with gravity in direct opposition. The motor seemed to stall and heated up considerably. A bystander observed a puff of smoke, but it later turned out that the kicker motor was still entirely functional. Although we’ve had to replace our old camera with one not specified as a direct replacement, it appears as though we are getting full usability. It’s lighter, too! Hmmm. . . Other good things. . . After a considerable amount of trials and tribulations, the deployment arm for our climbing hook was perfected (more or less) and the winch was more than capable of lifting the robot. Other than the rope issues, the winch mechanism was found to be incredibly powerful. Not only was the motor-and-transmission combination largely impossible to backdrive by itself, but the ratcheting mechanism backed it up. Once we were up in a match, there was no bringing it down. And although the autonomous was quite a problem at the start, it eventually became very helpful and effective, repeatably acquiring and kicking a ball. However, we can improve this without too much trouble; it kicked slightly off extremely consistently, indicating that it can be adjusted easily. *sigh of relief* the pluses were greater in amount than the minuses; we’re doing something right! By the way, go teams 294 and 359, our alliance partners throughout the finals! What a dream team! I’m so glad the code works (at least, mostly >. <)
-Nick.
