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· 2 min read

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).

· One min read

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.

· One min read

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.

· One min read

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.

· 6 min read

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.

· One min read

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.

· 2 min read

Today, half the team went to normal practice while the other half went to Week 0. Week 0 is a special competetion to make sure that FIRST's game software works/get newbies up to speed with normal competiton stuff/any other reason I missed. I was on the group that stayed at Great River, so I will let someone who went to week 0 explain what happened there. Things that happened back at the shop:

  • Light stuff (CornerGremlin and Rowan): There wasn't a ton to do, so people tested light strips.
  • Endeffector stuff (All three of us): This has a lot to do with the week 0 stuff. After some testing, it was determined that the ski plow did [DATA EXPUNGED] to either stablize the charging station or push cones and cubes around. CornerGremlin and I messed with the motore to get them working (although not without first accidently breaking them). Rowan actually programmed the thing so that it would work with autonomos.
  • Arm stuff (Rowan and I): Given lack of other stuff to do, we started working on the arm. Rowan did most of the work, I offered random bits of adivce and patched an issue with the controller. Said work included firmware updates and testing.

(If anyone who went to the competetion wants to write something, Put Description Here).

One more practice until Duluth.

Also, tomorrow is my birthday!

· 2 min read

Outside is a snowstorm, inside is music. CornerGremlin is apparently just our musician and tradition-person. Not sure how to describe it, but she has created several things likely to be programming traditions in the future. These include:

  • The creation of the programming mantra. The core is 'save, deploy, enable', but it is changed at every practice.
  • The song list! Programming now listens to music. It is selected by people writing songs on the board, and then playing them via speakers hooked up to someone's phone. For now, that someone is CornerGremlin. The speakers are from the film studies class usually happening in this room.
  • The Pink Panther Loop. The first song played is always the Pink Panther theme. It is played on repeat until someone gets annoyed. We keep track of how many loops and who turns it off. The current record is 16 loops until I stopped it. Future posters, update this if the record changes. For actual programming stuff that happened today:
  • Week 0 Packing (Me): I packed a box of stuff for the Week 0 group. It had laptops, charging cables, spare AprilTags, PS4 controllers, and etc.
  • Light Work (New Trio): The light work of today involved actually planning where the lights will go. There was also wiring.
  • 'SuperSubsystem' (Yours Truly™): Yours Truly™ created a subsystem example code containing all subsystems. It can work with anything, although I do wonder which specific bits would work if you hooked it up to a board.

Don't expect anything on Thursday, in-person practice probably isn't happening due to snowstorm.

· One min read

Today was a day of sound and light. Mostly because CornerGremlin's new job is to play music. Anyway, things that happened:

  • Lights for human player (Augie and CornerGremlin): We worked on setting up a light strip to match the color of either a cone or a cube so the human player knows what to put on the field.
  • More Skiplow Testing (Mowi and Yours Truly™): This allows us to move a cone or cube, as well as stabilize the charging station. Today's edits were to the control assignments.
  • Feature Flags (Yours Truly™, code merged by Captain 23): Yours Truly™ was working on feature flags all week, check the Valentine's Day post for details.
  • Musical Motors (Mowi, Yours Truly™, Augie, and CornerGremlin): We all worked on getting the motors to play music, because they can do that. The easy part was picking songs and converting them to CHRP. The hard part was getting the syntax to work with a Phoenix Pro. It still isn't done.

Now Programming has music to equal Build! Ops kind of just does very dramatic karaoke.

· One min read

We're fixing a bot and the walls are off white. Things that happened today:

  • General Subystem Patching (me): I spent the first chunk of practice fixing random things in the code. I started with testing the skiplow. The one error encountered was caused by the solenoids being mapped to 2, 3, and 1 instead of 5, 4, and 3. Afetr that, I fixed the arm code to use CANSparks instead of Talon SRXs.
  • Lights (Rowan): Rowan spent practice working on the lights code. Turns out that circuit boards don't play nice with code for an entire robot. But he got it working and purple. And then make them dance.
  • Swerve Drive (Captain 23 and CornerGremlin): These two continued working on the swerve drive. We now have more autos! Captain 23 also worked on hooking up Apriltags to the swerve drive.
  • Yours Truly™ was at drive practice for most of the day, if he wants to add programming stuff that he did he can do that. Edit 2/18/2023: Yours Truly™ was working on feature flags.

You know, I thought that next week was Duluth. Brain fart!