36 posts tagged with "build season"

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.

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