This is partially an experiment in formatting, using a bullet point list of things we did.

• Printing Apriltags (Yours Truly™ and I, assisted by Nyx). We printed Apriltags, which was a minor adventure because the printer wasn't normal. After a failed ethernet attempt and not being able to find Micheal, we just found a chromebook and just followed the instructions on the wall.
• Limelight Testing (Yours Truly™, Quinn, Rowan, and I). After the Apriltags were printed, Yours Truly™ and I got the board set up. Then Yours Truly™ altered some settings to get better visibility and we checked that the tags registered. This lasted most of practice because Yours Truly™ had the laptop with the actual limelight stuff on it, and I didn't know how to set things up.
• Swerve Work (Captain 23 and Quinn). More work was done on swerve stuff todays. I don't really understand what they're doing but it seems like swerve should... well, Captain 23 says that he hopes he finishes soon.
• Pneumatics testing (Yours Truly™). Some people from build needed a programmer to run pneumatics they were testing.
• Autonomous (New Trio). The new autos were tested today. The robot was short enough that the usual table barricades wouldn't work, and Mowi had the robot ram into him before it was adjusted. Outside of that things went smoothly enough, and the TEST robot drove, both autonomously and by joystick, with their code.

This has been your recap for this Saturday.

Today was a fairly normal practice. Yours Truly™ taught the New Trio how to make autos. They all got basic driving autos done by the end of the night. Captain 23 put swerve stuff on Shuffleboard. I helped test a claw that won't be used, went to a meeting to decide the intake, and was going to work on intake skeletons but deleted the example stuff first and had to spend the rest of practice fixing things.

Terminate log.

Working 4:30 to 8:30, something something something meaning~

Tonight the highlight was a planning meeting wih build where we decided what arm design to use. Roughly. We know it's going to have a few joints run by chains, which is progress! Also, the new trio finally got to testing Robot code! Rowan and CornerGremlin were sucessful before dinner - CornerGremlin right before she had to leave. Mowi tested his code right after dinner. Other notable things that happened:

• Quinn learned swerve stuff from Captain 23.
• I worked on skeleton code for the arm. There were some bugs, but nothing restarting VScode couldn't fix.
• Captain 23 and I worked on troubleshooting the swerve modules and dealing with firmware updates.

That's all, folks!

It's the first Saturday of build season, and I was the only experienced programmer there in the morning.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. The new trio actually has experience now, and they spent their time working on making command-based robots. CornerGremlin had a lot of errors in the morning, but they were sorted out. Things went smoothly for Mowi and Rowan. I spent the morning working on the intake and importing the CAN and Talon stuff.

Captain 23 showed up in the afternoon. We worked on testing swerve modules. We had to wire each motor and Cancoder in, test them individiually, and then unwire them and move on to the next. After testing, it turned out that most of the Cancoders didn't work thanks to soldering issues. The new trio tested their code on the TEST robot George.

Terminate log.

Today was the first practice of the build season! We have our game, we have a plan, and we can start coding.

Techincally Tuesday was the first practice, but it was basically "'kickoff part 2'" and the only important thing that happened was creating the repository of the 2023 robot. If you are looking for a descriptipn of the game, or of kickoff planning, please look elsewhere. While this is technically a blog, I consider it more of a record for internal information. It's on the site that's basically just for programming and no-one else has a reason to look at. I'm pretty sure Ops has a wonderful description of the game somewhere, and kickoff can be summarized thusly: "'We should do something!'" breaks into small groups "'What have our small groups decided we should do?' 'EVERYTHING!'" several rounds of voting "'Alright, back to small groups'". Repeat for ten hours until we finally figure out what to do.

Anyway, programming today. Captain 23 and Quinn worked on swerve drive. Yours Truly™ tought everyone else how the normal code works and had them make normal drivetrains. I helped out with that, but spent most of my time waiting for a job that turned out to not matter. That's life I guess. Also, Mowi expressed in interest in taking on the task of lights when the time comes.

I also learned that GITHub is a pain in the a** thanks to some backend stuff causing the branch to fork. That's why a lot of blog posts are late. Then again, this is more of a log than a blog anyway.

Happy Bloody New Year! This is acutally the second practice of 2023, but the first one was virtual and mostly involved teaching the new studnents how to use Git stuff. Today was quiet. Only four programmers showed up; myself and the three newbies. They aren't really new 'newbies' any more, but they are still new and it's a convinient way to remember them. We spent most of practice updating the computers to the 2023 WPI and FRC Tools. None of this was particularly hard, but it was time-consuming. It took hours for everything to download, extended by the computers going to sleep and cancelling them.

Rowan also worked on upgrading the firmware on the RoboRios. Mowi and CornerGremlin learned how to use all of the Git applications. Good for them, I barely know how any of them that aren't GitHub work.

I'll never be free, and don't expect any more of this thing at the bottom. The lyrics were to Derivakat's and Yuki's song Manhunt. I finally realized it was unprofessional.

Oddly enough Augie, I did decide to make a Thrusday blog. It's almost routine at this point, and honestly, it should be.

The main focus of today are the 2 TEST robots, the big day is looming around the corner! It's our first big thursday practice, so that's really fun. The first half of practice was working out any kinks in the code and writing some encoder code on the fly (half of which we didn't need). Both TORBS and Griffons spent the beginning of practice polishing up the not-yet-touched-the-robot code.

One the 2nd half of practice came along however (aka post dinner), things really started to get in gear. From the moment we came back from dinner, the robots were put into programming session mode. TORBS and Grifons each split and had what can be essentially be called a workout session. Screams of pain and agony and people being hurt (not actually) but you know how it can be

TORBS gameplan - Characterization and Feed Forward loops! How crazy! This is getting a little too close to PID tuning Captain 23...

Griffons gameplan - Encoders, Encoders, and Limit switches. There's only so much more fine tuning to do. This is also getting close to PID Tuning

Rating? Too stressful but really fun, no numbers today! (There might be a Friday practice)

It's TEST week 8, and we finally have things working. This will be the last post before the competition, unless Yours Truly™ decides to make a post on Thursday.

All of us experienced programmers spent most of practice trying to get the robots running. Each group (Captain 23 and Quinn for Torbs, Act of Liam, Yours Truly™, and I for Griffins) encountered many errors and trials, but the robots are mostly functional. The Torbs 'bot is moving, the Griffins 'bot needs some testing, but I think I fixed the bugs. Act of Liam wouldn't let us test without a limit swtich.

That was not all that happened during practice. I spent the first chunk trying to fix an error in Github/Gitbash and making a button map. Yours Truly™ helped the new students out. The others just worked on code for the robots.

The newbies are doing well. Rowan tried to learn command-based programming, which he apparently doesn't understand. Mowi messed around with motors. CornerGremlin made a motor spin and Java 'yell at "[her]" for stupid reasons'.

Let's hope that TEST goes well. Overall rating of the day: 7/10.

Across land and sea,

It's week 7 of TEST, and the deadline is closing in. Yours Truly™ and I spent practice working on a subsytem for Griffins called Thomas, and there is not a good way to explain what that is. We also spent a lot of time struggling with imports. We can't wait to start testing on the Robot. BUILD.

Quinn finished the Torbs code. He also spent time creating a slideshow to map out the PS4 buttons.

CornerGremlin spent her time organizing the cart. Everything is super neat now. We even found the TV remote in the process!

Captain 23 worked on swerve stuff, and Act of Liam did a little bit of everything.

Mowi learned how to program a controller today. Yay!

Apologies for the lack of content. Closing meeting is soon. Overall rating of the day: 7.5/10.

A desperate Dream, and a fire inside,

​ Heya! This is week six. ​ Attendance today was lower than usual, we're missing Quinn, Augie, and Ford, but we've got this! There is a lot to do today and even more now that there are less people.

TORBS programming was done by Act of Liam, programming off where the others left off. This includes getting a pseudo subsystem in as well as a bunch of other neat additions. The TORBS team is using a rotating system to get the rings onto the pillars and making sure a motor does what you want it to is always going to be a little bit of an issue.

Not much griffon programming today, there is still a lot of work to do, but we've got it! The things left to to consist of getting the drivetrain actually running as well as setting up a limit switch for the elevator system. I don't think there is too much to do at this point other than to wait for the robot to come!

On the topic of the code learners, there was a lot of learning today! Everyone is starting to get really comforable with the Java basic and its honestly quite amazing. Act of Liam created this long list of them to do with random robot based challanges. This consists of making a drive train, working with smartdash board and so much more.

Captain 23 and some other people now and then made some serious progess on the swerve bot, both before and during practice. There was a good amount of math being done to figure out angles, but the result ended nicely. The robot is now starting to get PID tuned for turning. You can point in a certain direction with the joystic and it just points that way! I am so excited for what is to happen next

Overall rating of the day: 8/10

Huzzah!