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!

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.

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.

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!

The most important thing that happened today was filling out the We See You form. It's a short form the mentors send out to make sure that everyone on the team is being seen and heard, as well as to give team members a chance to reflect. Other things that happened today:

• Code Polishing (Me): This started as SkiPlow testing, but then went in a completely different direction. By ther end of practice, I had synced all the subsystems to one PS4 controller and deleted the now-defunct intake code.
• Cancoders (CornerGremlin and Mowi): CornerGremlin and Mowi made it so that all of the wheels would line up when the robot was enabled.
• Feature Tags (Yours Truly™ and Quinn): Yours Truly™ will explain this. And that I will! Feature flags are essentially togglable subsystems. The drivetrain, arm, skiplow and more have a little slider to them. I think its pretty cool and each files get saved to the RoBorio and so you set them once and only go back to change them anytime you have to turn on or off a subsystem.
• Lights (Rowan): Rowan continued working on the ID lights from last time.

Take care!

This blog post has two sections. The first is written by "[REDACTED]", and covers some of the events prior to the extended bag day section of practice. The second is by Yours Truly™, and covers the events of the latter half of practice. Things that happened earlier:

• Pneumatics testing (me): I spent the morning helping Build test pneumatics by enabling the robot. After a few instances of accidentally pressing spacebar and e-stopping the robot, I just left a laptop with build.
• Skiplow solenoid adjustment (me): I adjusted the skiplow from the existing double-solenoid system to singe solenoids, as well as allowing the left and right arms to move independently.
• Limelight coordinate testing (Yours Truly™ and Captain 23): Yours Truly™ and Captain 23 spent most of practice working on turning the limelight coordinates into something usable. I will let Yours Truly™ describe it in more detail.
• Swerve Preferences (New Trio): The new trio named all the swerve modules. This means that it's easier to trade out modules if/when they break, because then each module can simply be assigned as front left/front right/back left/back right.

Apologies, I have to leave now.

Yours Truly™

HAHAHAHAHAAAA I stayed past the 4:00 time and Oh boy did not much more get done.

We wrapped up the rest of the work, I continued working on the limelight, the whole lining up this is really cool. Rowan also worked on lights, but they weren't working by the end of the night so who knows how thats gonna go, but I have high hopes. Actually, the idea for lights this year is kinda cool with our lights being in a yellow triangle for cones and a purple square for cubes. I'm kinda excited for how this one is gonna go! :) besides that, the Swerve tuning got done-ish and some more planning (For when we get the robot) got done. I had to leave at 8:30 and the robot was not even done at the time. I'm writing this currently as an afterthought and I was what, 15 minutes early? The robot got done at 8:45 and we await the robot on Valentines day!

Today was a very happy day for programming, as a lot of code got merged from the branches on to main. This included code for the endeffector, arm, and most importantly the Swerve Drive. It is finally done!

On the other hand, the more things change the more they stay the same. We worked on limelight code. Captain 23 started work on telling the robot to move to given coordiantes. I was supposed to work on turning limelight data into coordinates, but I just added a network table and tried to parse the syntax from the website.

Meanwhile, Yours Truly™, Rowan, and Mowi worked on PID tuning the old TEST robot. That went well. CornerGremlin was working on swerve wiring.

Unraveling.

Today, Programming was almost entirely occupied with PID tuning.

PID tuning is a very complicated subject, but it boils down to giving the robot numbers so that it knows what distances are and how to travel distances. If you want to know more about the subject, follow the link here. The first hour of practice was devoted to learning how PID tuning worked, and then Captain 23, Rowan, and Mowi kept PID tuning the robot for the rest of practice. By the end, they had managed to get the robot to spin and push a cone. This means we basically have a working auto three weeks before Duluth, which is probably a record for the team. I helped a little, but did not do much outside of asking obvious questions and reminding Captain 23 to flip the tables so they worked as barricades.

Other things that happened today included Yours Truly™ working on a new page for this website and CornerGremlin doing a bunch of wiring.

Week 5 already? Jeez.

Programming was very bright today, both figuratively and literaly:

• LED Work (New Trio, assisted by Yours Truly™ and I): This took up most of the day. The new trio tried to code some lights for testing, with myself advising, and Yours Truly™ helping when things went very wrong. CornerGremlin wired most of the stuff together (Mowi also did some wiring, but less). It took until lunch to realize that the light strip didn't work, so a new one was grabbed. The first achivement was getting a single LED to glow pink. Then they made it glow very bright white. Then they made the whole strip pink. They began working on the indicator code (code to let the human player know if we wanted a cube or cone), but did not finish in time.
• Swerve Update (Captain 23): A motor turned out to be busted and testing was hectic. On the other hand, the swerve code was working, so it should be done soon.
• Motor Testing (Captain 23, CornerGremlin, Myself, and Chris): A swerve motor was messed up so we had to fix it. We needed Captain 23 to come in after a while because we couldn't figure out what was wrong. Side note; after this and the LED stuff, CornerGremlin is becoming really good at wiring.

Will the New Trio complete their subsystem? Is swerve testing ever going to stop? Will Rainbow Hell Lights be accepted? Find out next time on Programming Log.

P.S. Yours Truly™, if you are reading this, I found a working alt-code for ™: 0153.

Tonight was a very loud night in programming. Things that happened:

• LED Discussion (All of Programming): We spent the first half an hour of programming discussing how we were going to handle the 'sick lights' this year. We ended up figuring out that there were three methods; doing what we did last year, buying a Blinkin (spellcheck needed) from Rev Robotics, or building one our selves. Mowi asked to code the lights.
• Pneumatics Testing (Mowi and CornerGremlin, possibly Rowan): These two/three tested pneumatics.
• Swerve Stuff (Captain 23 and Quinn): Swerve work is going to be ongoing for another several weeks. I just hope it's done before Duluth.
• Rowan programed the Prototype Endeffecter and switched the motor to NEO 550.