The last full-team practice before Minneapolis 2023. Things that happened today:

• Limelight Testing (Me): Just getting Tyche's limelight to functional.
• Programming Bin Packing (CornerGremlin): We once again cannot bring the cart to the tournament, so CornerGremlin packed a bin.
• Arm Testing (Rowan, Captain 23, eventually more people): The first success was in telling the arm to go to a set position using Smart Dashboard. They then started working on hooking that up to a button.
• Cone Mode Switch (Multiple Unknowns): We now have multiple modes for picking up cones on either the endeffector, intake, or both. I'm not sure which.

Yours Truly™ can add anything that happened after I left. Otherwise, this is the end.

Lots of things happened today!

• Arm Testing (Captain 23): The arm works now!
• Tyche Motor Alignment (Me, Mowi, CornerGremlin, Yours Truly™, Captain 23): Tyche's drivetrain needed to be aligned. I started testing it, then when it turned out to be beyond my area of expertise it was turned over to CornerGremlin and Mowi. This took up most of the day, becuase the motors simply would not align properly. Either one was 90 degrees away from the others, or the front and back were swapped, or one of half a million other things. Captain 23 and Yours Truly™ helped out later, and eventually Captain 23 came through with a solution: it was needed to get the offset of the motors earlier than we had been. I didn't actually help a lot.
• Backup Swerve Offsets (Mowi and CornerGremlin): A spare swerve module needed to have its offsets found. It required Frankenstiening together a few other things with the module but was doable.

One more (full-team) practice, and then Duluth.

WE'RE IN THE WALLS! WE'RE IN THE *** WALLS!

Apologies. Conferences were going on, so everyone had to cluster into the build room. Eventually Ops got their room back, but Programming only got about half an hour before we had to move to the gym. The cramped build room, combined with moving twice, had me a bit on edge. It felt like we weren't supposed to be there. Add that to the fact that we were supposed to be quiet, and it felt like the meme was appropriate. Or maybe it's just my not-actually-paranoia acting up. Who can tell. Anyway, things that happened today:

• Engineering Log (Mowi and I): We spent some time working on the engineering log. It's still in the outline stage, but Mowi started adding paragraphs.
• Misc work (Captain 23): Captain 23 worked on auto pathing, among other things.

Oh god, I just realized the opening ramble is more than half of the post.

Today, we have Moriai again. The robot now has a (mechanically) functional intake, arm, and endeffector, and looks truly massive. So what better to do than test it?

• Arm testing (Captain 23): This started out with a lot of SparkMax issues. After those were fixed, the arm moves! Later a bug showed up that made it so that trying to control the motors from the Rev app just broke everything and disconnected it from the rio. Then the cord on the elbow pulley sliced through the plastic wheel it was mounted on. The shoulder works though. There may or may not have been some breakage of the robot (shown below) We all congregated to build funeral style and bid farewell to the robot. We got a kick out of that. We sent it of to build like that and build threw that back at us. All in good fun!
• 
• Rainbow HellLights (Me): I made a variant of the rainbow lights that should work on the robot. Or more accurately, fixed all the errors and actually implemented it in Robot Container.
• Endeffector Testing (Captain 23 and Rowan): The endeffector kind of works. There were a few errors, like getting the cone and cube commands reversed, but they were easily fixed.
• Robot Documentation (Yours Truly™): Yours Truly™ wrote a bunch of stuff about the 2022 robot, Janus.

I don't know what Kai Ni actually means (based on my limited knowledge of Japanese I'm guessing something along the lines of Mark 2), I was just making a Kancolle reference. UPDATE: I looked up what it means. It means 'times to', which is close enough.

Today, we got Moriai back to test. There was some CAN wiring to do because build didn't remember to wire everything together.We were able to test the precision-drive, arm, and intake. Precision-drive worked the first time, which is interesting. The arm motors were not working. Other things that happened today:

• Endeffector Code Weirdness (Mostly Me and Rowan): There was a kerfuffle in the code because of weird errors that I ran into and Rowan ran into and maybe fixed? I think that if we try to run both it and the arm at the same time something is going to break.
• Rainbow Lights (Me): I made a version of rainbow lights that works on the robot. I got most of the way through.
• PID Values (Captain 23): Captain 23 put PID values for the arm on Smart Dashboard.
• We spent like half an hour talking about MLP and Kingdom Hearts while listening to random songs from the former. The songs continued playing for the rest of the morning This has nothing to do with programming I just thought it needed a mention.

The title comes from our robot names: Moriai (our Duluth/Practice bot, name meaning Fate) and Tyche (our Minneapolis bot, named after the Greek goddess of luck).

Huh, already March and only the third General Status Update. Weird.

• Cancoder updates (Mowi and I): We updated and re-organized 15 Cancoders. This is a good thing.
• Arm Update (Captain 23, Quinn): The math is done and the encoders are set up. All that is left is PID tuning.
• Button Consistency (Yours Truly™): Yours Truly™ did something I started a few months ago. He made sure that none of the button controls overlapped, no controllers were digitally created more than once, and etc.

Board.

We were working today. We even had all of programming!

• Button mapping (Mowi and I): We went through the code and found all of the buttons currwntly in use. This is useful because if two plus things are mapped to the same button, bad things happen.
• Arm work (Yours Truly™ and Captain 23): If we want the arm done by the 10000 Lakes Regional, we need to work fast. From what I could tell, they spent practice doing a lot of complicated math. I won't try to translate given that it is very complicated but it looks accurate.
• Intake work (Rowan): The intake work is going well. Motors have been linked to the rollers. Also it apparently uses the D-Pad, which I haven't seen used before.
• Endeffector polishing (Me): I modified the endeffector code so it should be able to run backwards now.
• Motor Assignment (CornerGremlin): A bunch of spark motors have IDs now.

When I say all, I mean minus Act of Liam.

So Duluth happened. Today was our first in-person practice since (Thursday was mostly talking about strategy and a good chunk of the team was online). Most of the team didn't show up. CornerGremlin was in the ops room all morning, Yours Truly™ and Captain 23 were at the practice field, and most of the mentors were out, so it was just me in the programming room. I just worked on the end-effector. It should function properly now.

I'm glad it was a slow day.

This is going to be a long post. After the packing events on Tuesday (which have their own blog post, it just got lost somewhere), we went on the trip. As this is a very long story, I have used the truncate function to conceal it from the general list. If you just want the highlights:

• We won the Team Spirit award.
• We made it to the second round of the playoffs, lost, and then lost our first match in the lower division.
• My roommate got Covid and it wasn't discovered until after the trip.

This will be the last post before Duluth. A very few things happened today.

• Light troubleshooting (Augie, Rowan): We troubleshot the lights. They work now.
• Packing (CornerGremlin and others): A lot of packing happened. Due to shennanigans, we weren't allowed to bring the cart.

Also, we hit a new record for Pink Panther Loops: 30.