Competition Week 3

Pit set up, robot ready to go! ... ish...

This was quite a busy week for us all. We started Monday and Tuesday completing our final robot preparations during our 6-hour access period, and ended the week with our first competition of 2019 at the Sundome Arena in Yakima. 

Unbag, Redux

Tools laid out and organized. First and only time this year!

We actually made it! Our student body slowly emerged from their homes, rested, unsick, and eager to get through the final steps prior to competition. During unbag we managed to install our new (third!) elevator, a number of mechanical and electrical upgrades, and we promised as much time as possible to our software team! ... We gave them about 20 minutes... Everything we planned for took longer than we planned, even when we planned on things taking longer than we planned. Not ideal, but, we were mechanically sound, electrically sound, and our previous software shakedown was smooth as silk. The gremlins of electrical-ness had other plans.

Our unbag was broken into two days, we spent 2 hours on the first day installing our new elevator (did I mention this is the third elevator we've built?), elevator gearbox, and updating the components on our intake arm. Calm, quiet ambiance often provides the best work environment when we have a specific, detailed task list to be completed in a given time frame, so we ran our unbag in the lab with the CNC router running, cutting spares to throw into the bag.

Elevator is tall.

Our second unbag was 4 hours, spent finishing electrical management, tidiness, labeling, and some minor pneumatic tweaks. Electrical tidiness is something of a point of pride on the CyberKnights. Each year we look at issues, failures, pain points of previous years, and attempt to not only lay out the electrical in a kinder manner, but also keep it looking aesthetically pleasing. It actually helps us keep track of things, and investigate issues if the wires are kept clean and labelled. Doing this however, takes a lot of time. We started off telling software that we were on time and they would get a full 2 hours with the robot. An hour later we were 30 minutes behind. 30 minutes after that we were an hour and 30 minutes late. Finally, our saintly software superstars received the robot. We powered it up! And.... it died. Not the best start... We tweaked some wires, fetched a new battery, and powered it up again! We downloaded the latest code, started testing individual motors, but by this point our time limit was up, and the robot went once more into the bag. We felt somewhat relieved to see the robot work, but knew we would have some work to do after inspection later in the week.

Sundome Competition

First visit to Sundome, I really enjoyed the venue!

Ah, travel meets. Sundome was a two-and-a-half hour drive through the mountains (quite a spectacular view for me at dusk). The mountains are an interesting... portal... for the CyberKnights. Throughout our history, we've had oddities and gremlins and strange occurrences happen, most frequently when we travel through the mountains... Sundome delivered. Oh, and it delivered well. Well, ok, first, Sundome is a lovely venue, large space, friendly staff, an espresso bar literally in view of our pit, we have enjoyed our first visit to Sundome. That being said, our Sundome adventure started almost as soon as we unbagged the robot and started getting ready to inspect. (Side note: Our volunteers and inspectors were amazing. More on that later, but seriously, these folks are incredible.)

Chrome, our robot, simply would not maintain a connection. Wait. Let's back up to one itty bitty detail from our unbag session. 20 minutes before putting the robot in the bag, we had powered it up, and the robot shut back down. There was a really good explanation. We made a mistake. When you're tired, and you rush things, you tend to make little mistakes, and sometimes, those little mistakes can have large consequences. After the robot shut down, we went to grab a new battery, and the mistake was made obvious to us. The red and black leads had been re-done when we mounted the main breaker in its new location, and they were backwards. We had plugged in a battery, backwards, and turned the power on.

Much electrical poking, prodding, and soldering.

At load-in, we knew we had a problem, but didn't know the extent of the problem. We started by simply running the robot again with the battery correctly hooked up, and we lost connection after 30 seconds. We swapped the radio. Same deal. All night we poked and prodded. Replaced the Roborio. Nada. We replaced the PCM. Zilch. Zippo. No dice. Still connection issues. But we were able to start diagnosing a little more. CAN talon issues. Our talons are mounted in 2 banks, right and left. We ran a short CAN, bypassing all the talons in the left bank. Robot turned on. Connected. We waited. (Tense music plays.) The robot disconnected. We frowned. The pits were closing. (We were going through inspection during this whole process. Our inspector, through the mechanical, pneumatic, software, and BOM checks was with us through the entire diagnosis. He was providing all the help he could, and when the pits closed, he told us to make sure we were the first team at the door, cause he'd be in our pit waiting, willing to keep helping us through.)

The next morning we were the first team at the door, our inspector was waiting at our pit- wait. I'm getting a little ahead of myself. All the above story... I actually hear secondhand.

My usual load-in day is pretty chaotic but fun. Normally, myself and a few other CyberKnights arrive, and immediately go to the field and jump in with setup. We get to re-acquaint with FRC folks, stay out of our pits, and well, help the event along. It's a pretty good time. This event, however, I left late (blame work) and didn't arrive at the hotel until almost 8pm. So much had already been done, the pits were closing shortly, and well, I just wasn't needed. So, I hung out around the hotel, resting from the short-ish drive and catching up on some of the events via slack. (I uhm.. spent the time watching an episode of Lost. Yep, re-watching an oldie and a... baddie...) A while later, our kids started trickling back in, the last of the mentors arrived, and the Chairman's group came to find the few of us, looking for some help with final preparations. Last week was super rough with robo-plague, even our Chairman's group was feeling the pressure. So, I spent the next few hours with them, going over things with the video and presentation. They finally let us go to sleep around midnight. (I would complain about 6 hours sleep here, but right as we were headed off to bed, another crew of event volunteers arrived back at the hotel, and they had to be at the venue earlier than us. FIRST volunteers are properly amazing.) After a nice 6 hour rest, a shower (definitely needed), and a hotel breakfast, we headed off the the arena.

We were the first team at the door, and our inspector was waiting at our pit. During the night, our electrical team had made a game plan for getting the bot up and running. We had a little over 2 hours before our first qualification match. We tore into it again, starting with swapping the PDP. I felt confident in the plan, the research from the night before, and had high belief that our issues would be resolved. We powered up the robot. I wore my best smiling face. Moments later - I turned that smile, upside down! Ugh. We disconnected again. I immediately thought it was about time to switch the plan ... D? E? One of those - and just swap EVERYTHING. We had about an hour until our first match. The team ran another test - removing all the talons from the CAN bus and running the robot. It worked! It honest to goodness worked. We had a brick that could run pneumatic actuators! Probably not the most effective alliance partner. The team started executing plan F and removed the 6 drive talons, replacing them with spares. We hooked up the 6 new talons to CAN, and ran the robot again. SUCCESS! We could move! Our first match was less than 10 minutes away, but we could drive, and with pneumatics, score hatches low. (Also somewhere in here we also swapped the VRM. It's a few days later and all a blur...)

Still made time for our mechanical checks. We needed to make sure we could drive!

Our first match of 2019, our LimeLight wasn't working, so for Sandstorm, we slowly crept forward off the HAB for 3 points. We followed up much stronger, scoring 8 hatch panels and re-parking on HAB level 1. 22 points in our first outing, with an 50% operational robot. Not bad...

Our second match we played defense. Apparently, we built a tank. We played hard defense, added a few last minute points, and won the match. Woo! After our first two matches, we had another nice long break over lunch. We used the time to replace the remaining 5 talons on our robot. We started testing the elevator. The gremlins returned, albeit in a less malicious manner. Our elevator lower limit switch was throwing sticky faults, and the hardware stop from the breakout board wasn't functioning. After further testing, and scientific poking and prodding, we removed the hardware limit and used software only to stop the elevator from slamming down into our frame and gearbox. We tested our carriage ball shooter next, fortunately with no ill effects. The rest of the afternoon we played in this configuration - we could drive and score hatches at any height, and we could collect cargo from the load station only and score at any height. Fortunately, or not, our reputation as a brick wall was quickly noticed by a number of our next alliance partners. Between matches, we continued testing our elevator and cargo ground intake. In matches, we played hard defense, and improved our sandstorm driving, earning more points.

I always like how our bots look in red.

After our last match of the day, we again had a large uninterrupted session to test and fix the elevator and ground intake, and get to bot to 100%. (Montage plays. Tired kids and mentors checking wires, checking talons, software running endless operational tests. Music reaches crescendo.) We ran a test of the ground intake with new and old ribbon cables, and simply couldn't identify why some tests passed while other failed. We were testing cables, we swapped encoders, we couldn't figure it out. Until finally, a breakthrough. We took a very close look at the ribbon cable mounted to the talon. In tightening the plastic security cover, we had pinched the ribbon cable. Hand tight, the cable worked, screwed in, it failed. Finally an answer. The pits were closing soon, so we quickly fabbed a new cable, tested, raised the boombox over our heads and pumped our fists in the air. 

Intermission - We like a lot of teams in PNW. We've become good friends with teams over time, and I hope we become friendly with even more. Our good friends over at Apex happened to have one of those 'this is fine' dogs in their pit, and well, they had already packed up and gone home for the day so... Naturally...

Looks good!

But don't worry, we made what I consider to be a pretty fair trade.

Also looks good!

Saturday is eliminations day. We still had 2 more qualification matches, but we knew we weren't going to place very high. We were hoping to be a stealth pick, a dark dog, an underhorse. But that was still hours away. We quickly identified a second pinched cable as the cause of our elevator troubles and fab-ed a new cable. We started running our software shakedown once again, noticing an infrequent hiccup with the ground intake wrist encoder. We handed off a 99% complete robot to our drive team for the final 2 matches of the day. In match 1 (er, well, 11), the ground intake acted up again, and after scoring only a few cargo, we turned back to tank mode, and pushed a few blue robots around. We practiced scoring, taking extra care with the ground intake in our final match, and ended qualifications with a 7-5 record. Not great, but not bad for a metal brick, with every electronic replaced.

Magic box!

Lunch was our final gap in the event with complete robot access. Software had made a number of changes to fix the ground intake, and eliminate some interference with the elevator when acquiring cargo. (The intake process is fully automated using the encoders and beam break sensors, it looks awesome when its running full speed.) We ran tests. We ran them again. We spun the drive wheels. Ran the elevator. Ran the pneumatics. Everything. Worked. This was the robot we had designed and built. This was a robot that can score points for an alliance. This was a first round pick for the 8th alliance. Our first match would be against Jack in the Bot. And Apex. (Both of whom we had given... oranges...)

Operation Orange. I mentioned we have fun with teams at competition. The past few years we have had a fruit thing going. I don't remember exactly how it started (Spartronics!), but we've sorta embraced it, and enjoyed it. We have little stickers and temporary tattoos and buttons and things that we stick onto oranges, and then... well, hand them out to our friends. (Jack was most appreciative of our gift, they gave us back a bag of Fritos with a note: "Orange you glad we didn't orange you?" I like Jack.) Operation orange was just child's play though. Next weekend at Glacier Peak, we are pitted right next to Spartronics, and right across from Skunkworks. The fruit is real. Get ready.

Eliminations! Well, actually not too much to say about eliminations. We played hard defense against Jack in match 1, and couldn't match the point density of their dual climb. Our partner's intake broke for match 2, so we tried to outscore them, and got caught up on their alliance's defensive bot, and again couldn't match the 24 point double climb. Two hard fought matches, but, somewhat inevitable in the end. Despite the loss, our robot is at the level where it can score points and get noticed. Our team was energetic and excited. We had kids up and dancing well into the play-off tournament. We won the Innovation in Controls Award, rightly so (in my mind) for just how much our software and electrical team have stepped up this year.

Robot finally works! Off to eliminations!

Meets like this make me proud to wear the red and black jersey. We walked in with a brick, struggled, fought, persisted. We lost, but we lost well. We learned a ton. We danced. We re-kindled connections with our PNW FRC family. Some of us slept... A little...

Sleepy head coach.

I will try to sum up all of the above in a paragraph here. We walked into Sundome with a seemingly insurmountable problem in front of us. We replaced pretty much our entire electrical system throughout load-in, inspection, lunches, and gaps in matches. We did so in a planned-out and specific manner; first driving, scoring hatches, scoring cargo, and then picking up cargo from the floor. We broke down the problem into steps and small tasks, tackling each one at a time. It may sound odd to say that reliability was one of our strong-points - but we drove every second of every match. We scored hatch panels in every match. We score HAB points in every match, both in sandstorm and endgame (I think we missed one endgame HAB in 14 total matches?) Throughout this, our scouting team ran a new scouting app, and I hear it worked very well. Our drive time played hard and smart, and will keep learning from this past weekend's matches. Our storefront team did amazing, interacting with judges, families and other teams. Our Chairman's team enthusiastically described our mission. We had students volunteering as queuers and field reset. We had students running (walking) around the pits helping other teams in need. We ate some pizza. In closing, it was a good weekend for us. Looking forward to the next one.

Quote of the Weekend:

Hey we're watching the Chairman's video in bobl - bloobly - blooby - boggly - bobly - blah <cracks up laughing>, bobby's room. 

- very tired Chairman's presenter

Other Quote of the Weekend:

I just wanted to say a few words that I think can be best summed up by saying the following: this team really impressed me this weekend. For those who I haven't had a chance to meet yet, this is my first year as a mentor on 4911, but I've been an FRC mentor on and off since 2012. I'll be honest, we had a really tough road laid out in front of us from the minute we unbagged and we found out that Chrome was not immune to the robo-plague that's been going around. What struck me was how this team came together, how everyone kept cool under pressure and worked together through the issues, one by one. The team remained positive and supportive of each other through all of the challenges we faced. [...]  I was proud to see how the team held itself this weekend in the face of adversity and I am proud to call myself a CyberKnight. I'm super excited to show Glacier Peak what we can do! 

- Slack post from one of our new mentors (whom we may have stolen from our other other good friends at 4488)