32 posts tagged with "build season"

This post is so named because I actually was to be in the gym while the robot was being tested. And what a test it was.

• Voltage & Current Limiters (Me, Griffin): It was noticed that the robot was having brownout issues due to the sheer number of motors and subsystems, so we were assigned to do something about it. This meant making bits of code that would display the voltages and currents, and then making limiters that would stop the various motors from drawing too much power. It should also be noted that I called this around week 2 when I did the math and realised that the robot would have around 16 motors.
• General Testing (Rowan, Serena, Xiaohan, Zach): These four were using the robot for most of practice. They managed to make a path that would let us consistently score in the amp and finished it right after dinner. Then they came down to the practice field to make a number of tests. The main one was odometry, which took a large chunk of time.

Also Griffin and I got bored so we went outside and played catch with one of the spare notes for about 10-15 minutes.

Hello again. This is the last proper week of build season. We have practice tomorrow and Thursday to get everything done, week 0 is on Saturday, then it's just Tuesday and then Duluth. Orpheus and Euridyce should be ready by then.

• Intake Testing (Xiaohan, Rowan): One of the intake motors burned out and needed to be replaced. We tested it to make sure. Then later in the day the offsets needed to be altered again.
• Climber Work (Rowan, Serena): A lot of testing was done on the climber limits. It was also made faster.
• Logging Tests (Serena, Me): Serena set up a system to let us log all of the motor data, and I did a very brief test towards the end of practice.
• Auto Work (Me, Zach, Rowan, Xiaohan): Zach and I worked on autonomous stuff. Specifically updating the autos because we learned that they couldn't just use the default commands. So we needed to make sure that every single auto turned on the intake and shooter and had shoot commands in the proper places. Zach dealt with a lot of it. Then most of the autos were actually tested
• Bumper Work (Griffin, Davey): These two went to go work on bumpers for today due to lack of things to do.

It appears that despite my sucessors, I shall be making most blog posts for a while longer. For I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

(Sleep in this context means graduating and thus leaving the team.)

Today we shall learn the names of the robots. Our two options will either be Purple Rain and Delirious or Orpheus and Euridyce. I am voting for the former. Despite that, there were only a few things that happened today. On that list was:

• General Robot Work (Rowan, Zach, Xiaohan, Serena): We got to bring the robot to the practice field, and there was a lot that had to be made ready. Wiring, tuning, rearranging the CAN network because they got merged at some point, making sure the intake limelight had a working neural net, the works. Also messing with limit switches.
• Shooter PID Work (Me, Rowan, Chris [M]): As part of the testing it was decided that we needed a feedforward PID system to make sure the shooter wouldn't be pulled down by gravity. This took like an hour of Chris and I struggling with various encoder types before Rowan came over and solved the problem in about ten minutes. I'm glad that Rowan is the captain instead of me.
• Bumper Work (Davey and I): The bumper construction team required assistance, and we obliged. I only worked with them in the morning, Davey stayed during the whole practice.

Just four more practices until Duluth.

Today was a bit of a disaster. One of the intake motors started smoking (this is bad for you, don't smoke). The programming room smelled like burning tape, which is a lot worse than burning hair.

• Canceled task (Zack and I): We were going to set up the gym for testing Moirai but build stole her permanently.
• Shooter angle (Augie, Rowan, and Serena): worked on testing the shooter angle math.
• Wireing and such (Xiaohan):They worked in build with wiring and other stuff Rowan said he's good at. Also he (maybe) fixed the practice bot! This is great news.
• Hall effect (Griffin): He worked on testing the hall effect sensor (I am not really sure what this is).
• Limelights (me): My new job was to make the limelights on the practice bot have the correct values for something. I'm not exactly sure what. I also wrote all over the white boards in Orbonian glyphs. This was not exactly important but it made me feel better.

Side note: having itchy eyes sucks. Side Side note: It snowed last night. That was weird because it has not snowed most of the winter.

Davey is the new music person. Also I have a headache again.

• LED Work (Davey and I): The first chunk of practice was spent trying to find LEDs to test the code with. After learning that none of the LED strips had working adapters, we decided to go look for Moira's old sponsor board. This took us to the backend of the gym closet twice, all over the shop, and at the end we learned that the board had probably been thrown out. Then we tried to jury-rig together a working adapter before Chris showed up with definetly working LED strips, which had to have a jury-rigged adapter anyway. Then we tried to test the code and the Vera-be-damned thing tried to call LED 204. We only had 52 lights in the code. This turned out to be because we were creating one less LED in the code than actually existed (that number was 24 by the way) and then tried to call the last LED which according to the code didn't exist. After dinner we discovered that error and fixed it, before finally getting the lights to work. Then we learned that we could have just used the functional lights branch that hadn't been merged with main yet. By that point I was willing to call it quits, but we kept going and even got the lights to actually respond to the code.
• Button Binding Work (Zach, Griffin): These two made a new button diagram and re-bound all the buttons so that everything works. They also added a bunch of things to Smart Dashboard.
• Collect Note Work (Rowan, Serena): Debugging is occuring on the collect note command. That is all Serena will tell me.

That is all.

Can someone who is not me write a blog post for once? Every time I am out sick for whatever reason no post gets made. i might need to just start adding 'write a blog post' to the list of things to do. Anyway, things that happened today:

• Distance Sensor Work (Me, Rowan): I spent most of practice working on a distance sensor. This involved soldering a lot of thingas, fighting with CAN errors before learning that the fleeming thing was unplugged, and then Rowan moved everything from the intake to the indexer. Also we accidentally turned on preferences that weren't supposed to be on and had to do some work to fix them.
• Limelight Work (Xiaohan, Act of Liam): The limelight that broke yesterday is fixed.
• Lights Work (Rowan, Zach): The first chunk of practice was apparently spent dealing with a github error. By the end of the day the lights were finished.
• Move 1 Meter (Serena, Davey, Griffin): The 1-meter auto is in progress. Apparently part of the issue was wheel diameter, which was re-measured and now the robot moves almost one meter. It does still consistently undershoot.

I have convinced Rowan to add 'write the blog post' to the list of things to do each day.

Hello again. The weather is unreasonably warm for winter in Minnesota, regularly hitting the 40s. I just hope there is snow again. Anyway, things that were done today: Constants List (Me): We now have a list of constants to change. More than half of them are shooter constants. Kraken Adjustment(Rowan, Xiaohan, Zach): We finally have a practice bot with Krakens. As such, we needed to assign all of the motor and cancoder IDs, calculate the offsets, and check if the current PID values still work.
Other Adjustment (Griffin): Griffin spent most of practice on PID work for Moira. This included defining what a meter. Light Work (Davey): The lights are under construction, and are apparently going to be used for signalling this year. Pathplanner Fixes (Rowan): Pathplanner switched its coordinate system on us and we had to very rapidly fix it.

In other news, Captain23 was here today.

Apologies for the lack of post on Thursday, both people I requested make a post in my absence forgot. Anyway, things that happened today (in programming):

• Limelight Work (Me, Xiaohan, Davey, Rowan): We needed to make sure all of the Limelights were competiton ready. This meant making sure every limelight had the apriltag and detector software, even if not every Limelight could do both jobs. We ended up with one apriltag tracker, one detector, and two that could do both. We also figured out the offsets for the limelight currently on the robot.
• Auto Work (Serena, Rowan, Griffin): A lot of autonomous work of varying kinds was done today. We now have an auto that shoots one note and then gets out of the way, a list of available paths, and the existing autos modified to have the feeder be off at the start and the initial pre-loaded shot to happen.

Wonder of wonders, horror of horrors, it's a slow day today. The tasks available were either easily completed or out of our hands. But programming did still occur, and here is the list:

• Climber fix (Me, Rowan): The climber now has an emergancy down button. It's supposed to let us cancel the slow climb command if the alignment misses.
• Misc Subsystem Fixes (Xiaohan, Serena): There were a few other minor fixes that need to be done. The indexer needed to be switched to a one-motor setup, and the shooter adjusted to use right and left instead of top and bottom motors.
• Sensor work (Rowan): We now have a sensor that lets the robot tell if something is in front of it.
• Named Command Work (Me, Rowan): For whatever reason, the named commands in Pathplanner aren't working. Rowan did a bunch of testing to try and figure out where the error was, while I just made a ChiefDelphi account and posted our problem there. Then Rowan found out that our problem might not actually exist, fixed the thing causing the error in the one specific command that just so happened to be the only one we could run, and I deleted the post. (The specific problem was that the command required an intake, which the robot did not have.)
• Shooter Angle Work (Griffin, Davey, Serena(?)): The bits that aimed the shooter needed to be seperated from the actually shooty bit. They spent several hours trying to refactor everything around the new subsystem division, and then made some aiming commands.
• Xbox Controller Work (Xiaohan): Xiaohan decided to give our code Xbox controller functionality as well as PS4 controller functionality. I'm not sure why.

I also made a paper airplane.

We got the limelight kind of working. It only took Act of Liam's help to do it. Anyway, things that happened today:

• Limelight fixes (Me, Act of Liam [C]): Specifically we got the limelight working with neural vision by downloading the public model, then setting our mode to "detector". Then you go into the "configuration" tab, and upload your tensor flow lite model.
• Getting a TFlite file (Me, Chris [M]): This was the hardest part. While we had figured out how to get a TFlite file working, that didn't mean we had a TFlite file to work with. The process for doing that included, among other things: Downloading Python to try and install Tensorflow to get the converter; messing with the command line to try and get pip to work with python; Discovering that TFRecord files are not photos; Asking the MPArors for their TFlite file; And accidentally using the wrong file and needing to completely reset the limelight. But we can finally get the limelight to recognize notes.
• Pathing work (Griffin): Many new paths were made for autopickup, along with a new command to facilitate such.
• Autoaim work (Serena, Rowan): The math to calculate the speaker angle and aim while moving was completed.
• Lights Work (Davey): Davey made a design for where the lights should be and looked at the 2023 LED code. The 2022 light code is better IMO.

There was also a party after practice, but that is beyond the scope of this blog.