FTC 7314 Engineering Notebook 2016-04-09

Competition Season Meeting

Meeting Date	Meeting Time	Location	Team Members in Attendance:
9 April 2016	6-10pm	TCHS Brandywine	Akhila, Josh, Trevor, Myles, Matt, Jake, Snarr, Daniel

Tasks	Reflections
Programming	We had an short all hands education session covering our autonomous programming. This was intended as an introduction to our software structure for those students who have not yet been involved in programming this year. We identified our reusable classes, named “Steps”. The Steps are placed in a ordered list to create an autonomous routine. Here is a simplified sample of Red Inside that we reviewed together: Step_ReCalibrateGyroIfNeeded() Step_TurnLeft(40) Step_Straight(4500, Direction.REVERSE) Step_FindColorLine(ColorEnum.RED) Step_TurnLeft(90) Step_Straight(500, Direction.REVERSE) Step_TurnRight(0) Step_FindColorLine(ColorEnum.WHITE) Step_Straight(400, Direction.REVERSE) Step_TurnLeft(90) Step_Straight(400, Direction.FORWARD) Step_ControlDebris(ControlDebrisEnum.PICK_UP) // track white line to beacon. Detect color and press button. Step_TrackWhiteLine(ColorEnum.RED) Step_UnloadClimbers() // park robot away from beacon. Step_Straight(400, DcMotor.Direction.FORWARD) Step_TurnLeft(160) Step_Straight(1800, DcMotor.Direction.REVERSE After the education session Matt, Justin, and Mr Abersold worked on actual programming. We updated our autonomous for Blue side. Copying our recent improvements from red side. Blue side still needs to be tested
Hanging	The team continued to work towards hanging capability. They tried to work out hanging from the middle section. Unfortunately they found this to be too difficult, the tension stick formed an arc that extended outside our 18 inch box requirement. For a workable solution, the robot needs to be a little farther up the ramp to bring the tension stick within our size requirement. The team changed back to a poly hook for light weight and narrow fit for the hook release. The down side to poly is that the poly hook is larger and therefore harder to work within the 18 inch box requirement. This is still a work in progress.
Smokin' Motors	The motor for the robot arm burned up today. They replaced it, but it took about an hour from our planned activity of working on hanging. The team did a great job working together to repair the robot.