FTC 7314 Engineering Notebook 2015-11-16

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Competition Season Meeting

Meeting Date Meeting Time Location Attendees
TCHS Brandywine


Objectives / Systems Hypotheses, tests, observations, conclusions, plans
Making The Tank Treads
  • Bennett ground nuts, that would be bolted onto the tank treads. He did this by taking pliers and holding the nuts against the grinder and therefore the nuts became thinner. this made the nuts the right size to fit inside of the tank tread.
New Field Build
  • Justin helped build the new field, which proved to be a challenge. There are so many components to this year's field, and each one is complex. The main difficulty was with the mountains. The instructions weren't very clear, which didn't really hep at all. He managed to figure out the mountain, but then decided it to be tedious, so he switched to programming for a little while.
Programming
  • Akhila and Snarr, with the help of Mr. Abersold, resumed their work on the beacon autonomous. Last time they worked on this, there were a plethora of problems, including color sensor deficiency, lack of good cables, and encoder bugs. Today, nearly all of them were resolved to at least some extent.
  • The programmers walked in to see color sensors waiting for them, a welcome sight for anyone interested in control!
  • There were also some new cables, so connection issues would (hopefully) be lessened or even gone.
  • Because the field was in build mode, Akhila and Snarr had to test on the floor. This wasn't ideal because the terrain was different, and the sizing wasn't exactly right.
  • They set to work on the encoder bug first. First, they added a reset encoders step to pretty much all the code that utilized them. When tested, this seemed to help a lot! The bug didn't really come up, and the coding team hopes it stays that way!
  • There was still alot of tweaking values involved, but this was mostly because of the sudden change in terrain.
  • The color sensor also was pretty effective. It tracked the white line, but they still can't really be sure, because it wasn't tested on a full field. Next week, they hope to wrap up the color sensors, and refine the autonomous so the movement isn't as choppy.


Tasks Reflections
Engineering Notebook
  • Myles edited the engineering notebook so he could gain a better understanding of some of the processes and systems on the robot. Although it can get pretty tedious, he likes editing the notebook for this reason.
  • Daniel worked on revising the engineering notebook to make it better because he knows that the notebook is more important than the robot itself. It also helps him get a feel for the programming team's work. Daniel works largely on mechanical, so it is important he learns what the programming team is doing to help build the robot. He understands now that code and hardware work together to make the robot carry out whatever it needs to.
  • Matt worked revised the engineering notebook to make sure there are no mistakes in the entries. Although content is most important, Matt would like to minimize any grammar errors and spelling mistakes.


Recorded by: Date: Journal Editor: Date: