36 posts tagged with "build season"

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!

It's the first Saturday of build season, and I was the only experienced programmer there in the morning.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. The new trio actually has experience now, and they spent their time working on making command-based robots. CornerGremlin had a lot of errors in the morning, but they were sorted out. Things went smoothly for Mowi and Rowan. I spent the morning working on the intake and importing the CAN and Talon stuff.

Captain 23 showed up in the afternoon. We worked on testing swerve modules. We had to wire each motor and Cancoder in, test them individiually, and then unwire them and move on to the next. After testing, it turned out that most of the Cancoders didn't work thanks to soldering issues. The new trio tested their code on the TEST robot George.

Terminate log.

Today was the first practice of the build season! We have our game, we have a plan, and we can start coding.

Techincally Tuesday was the first practice, but it was basically "'kickoff part 2'" and the only important thing that happened was creating the repository of the 2023 robot. If you are looking for a descriptipn of the game, or of kickoff planning, please look elsewhere. While this is technically a blog, I consider it more of a record for internal information. It's on the site that's basically just for programming and no-one else has a reason to look at. I'm pretty sure Ops has a wonderful description of the game somewhere, and kickoff can be summarized thusly: "'We should do something!'" breaks into small groups "'What have our small groups decided we should do?' 'EVERYTHING!'" several rounds of voting "'Alright, back to small groups'". Repeat for ten hours until we finally figure out what to do.

Anyway, programming today. Captain 23 and Quinn worked on swerve drive. Yours Truly™ tought everyone else how the normal code works and had them make normal drivetrains. I helped out with that, but spent most of my time waiting for a job that turned out to not matter. That's life I guess. Also, Mowi expressed in interest in taking on the task of lights when the time comes.

I also learned that GITHub is a pain in the a** thanks to some backend stuff causing the branch to fork. That's why a lot of blog posts are late. Then again, this is more of a log than a blog anyway.