This post provided by the plausible peak of practicality. The permanent partner profoundly piping past plants and planets. The paradigm protocol: P. Now that we've paid the piper, lets play!
Parts!
The machines in the lab have come to life. They are chewing up raw aluminum, and spitting parts back at us. (And well, cut-up sheets.)
Prototypes!
Mechanical sub-systems are usually never "finished". Intakes especially are constantly breathed on, iterated, or built new from scratch. Modular system mounts aid in the process of re-designing, refining, and tuning mechanisms. Even as CAD approaches "completeness", our team is still building and breaking our intake mechanism. Until competition, we won't know if our decisions for intake and deploy are competitive and successful. To this end, we constantly watch forums, blogs, youtube and other sources for as many ideas and options as possible. We look for the trade-offs made by other teams, and feed any new, potentially positive knowledge into our prototypes and geometry.
Paths!
While we are now building our 2019 chassis, our software team has been hard at work, sharing our 2018 bot with our drive team, still making progress. The team has been making the best use of libraries shared by other teams, upgrading all firmware and core code to the latest 2019 versions. With all of our previous robots running the same codebase, multiple software students can work simultaneously, each with their own robot. Our 2 core focus points are building reliable sensor routines, and building fast paths. The pathing team has been generating a list of all potential paths, starts, ends, alternative midpoints, and so on. Though the tuning is on our 2018 chassis, once the 2019 beast is ready, the only adjustment <should> be the PID values.
Practice!
Our drivers are sharing the robot with software, still driving every day if possible, and getting used to the new routes and locations on this years field. Running back to back drills, our software paths and driver paths are getting faster and more reliable. (I think software is winning right now :-D) I certainly hope to see these results carry into competition season. Maybe we'll have some races at the end of build season and the end of competition season. Software versus drivers. This Sunday-Sunday-Sunday...
Practical Exams!
It's finals week. The kids are all fried. Friday's are rest days. Normal progress will resume this weekend.
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