32 posts tagged with "build season"

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.

Lots of things happened today.

• Limelight Testing Finished (Yours Truly™ and I): This is the reason for the title. Most of programming was spent hunting for the bug, which turned out to be the command not requiring the subsystem to run. This was confusing, as we thought that that was fixed. A bit more digging on Yours Truly™'s part revealed the error, and so we got the thing working. A bit of debugging in the merge request and we were done for today. As I said, Next Time.
• Further Swerve Calibration (Captain 23, assisted by myself): This has been going on for several practices now. Today, Captain 23 and I downloaded a firmware update to fix the massive inversion issues from last week. After that, Captain 23 spent the rest of practice PID tuning the drivetrain.
• Pneumatics (CornerGremlin, Mowi, and Yours Truly™): These three were working on pneumantics, and realized that there were wiring issues. They also began writing the skiplow code.

See Y'all in February!

There are two authors again now! Things that happened today include:

• Limelight Work (Us Two): We worked on some code on the limelight. It took three created files, four modified files, one deleterd file, and we still don't have it done.
• NEO Stuff (Yours Truly TM): WE love issues. Issues start with "I" and I don't like the fact that I have to solve problems I create :/ Oddly enough though, it's not too bad given the state of the robot. The NEOs were not showing up and it wanted to update and issue after issue but it resolved itself. The NEOs were then hooded up to a cool prototype but I had the NEOs running at .05 speed and then they were like "Lets go faster!" and so I cranked it up to 0.7 and it almost broke the prototype... SO we're still gonna play with that number.
• Skiplow Subcommand (Mowi): Making a command to run the skiplow.
• Endeffector Skeleton (Rowan): Starting the skeleton for the endeffector. We don't know what it's going to be yet.
• Swerve Stuff (Captain 23): Swerve calibration was attempted. It didn't work.

Next time, Limelight! NEXT TIME!

Haha! I'm back to the blogpost! It's Yours Truly™. The turnout today was missing Augie so I'm creating a blog in his stead. Today was some really weird shenannigans.

Captain 23 and pretty much everyone else worked on updating the swerve, some old firmware and stuff nothing big, and then BAM everything starts blinking Green/Yellow. This is news to us. We look up and down the CanCoder manual and there's nothing and then someone remebers why. It's because Pheonix Tuner is now Pheonix Pro. We need a Pheonix Pro liscense to use the motors now. Its pretty much a subscription now, $100 every now and again or something. It's kinda baffeling that it's come to this now but oh well. After some careful manuvering and signing in and a bunch of other things, all of the motors work now. Yay!

While this was happening there was some cool math being done by Yours Truly TM. It was a bunch of work on the double pivot arm and it kind of a pain to get everything working. Sin Cos Tan being tossed around everywhere and it was a lot of effort and I could go on and on about it but you can just have the Graph

Augie was missing :( Quinn was poofed for the first half of practice :( We lost CornerGremlin and Rowan after Dinner :(

but, it was fun nevertheless! Have a good day y'all

Today was a blinding day in programming. Mostly to us.

• Further Limelight stuff (Both of Us): Making SmartDashboard see the Limelight. It took a while and several failed attempts, but eventually we got the info from the Limelight to the robot and SmartDashboard. We also made a motor that should react to the light. The Limelight LEDs and circuit board LEDs were very bright, hence the day being blinding.
• More Swerve things (Captain 23 and Quinn): These two soldered wire on and recalibrated the swerve drive.
• Arm Work (Yours Truly™, Mowi, and Rowan): They worked on programing the prototype arm, and were succsessful. They also fixed the elbow of the arm because it wouldn't move, and rewired the robot to properly use the arm.

Take care y'all!

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!