Week 7 - Testing and Tuning

Full size practice field to test and tune our contraptions.
Not pictured: our robot...

Week 7 was filled with many hours in the shop and troubleshooting at the practice field. You may ask, are we caught up now? Absolutely not. Are we terrified? Yep! Our schedule may be challenging, but it’s half the fun. However, it’s not so fun when you're at the practice field, and you're trying to fix issues with the gyroscope (also known as the Pigeon) instead of running cycles. Anyways, spread your wings and let's soar through Week 7!

This week's update is brought to you by the team President & Design Lead! Woo guest appearance!

Editors Note: Yep - this post was written entirely by our Student Lead! (Except the image captions. I did those.) She copied the format and flow, but brought her own thoughts and voice to the blog. Enjoy!

Big Al and Lil Al.
One is our student president, the other is a robot.

The goals for Week 7 are to make spare parts or subsystems, assemble/test/iterate on the robot, drive practice, and auto testing/tuning. In order to do the last two items on our punch list, one still needs a robot that can drive predictably. While our robot does drive mostly predictably, there's issues when we try to rotate the robot 90 or 270 degrees.

We’ve come a little ways since the Week 6 update. The electrical team had a meeting that was entirely dedicated to wiring the robot, and they knocked the majority of it out in one session. I do think that we need to recruit elves on our team. We could really use the tiny hands. By the second meeting of the week, the elevator was fully wired! It took some trial and error as there's so many moving parts. After some pondering, they had settled on running black cable carrier on either side of the elevator and utilizing angle brackets. 

Aside from electrical, manufacturing has been busy taking apart the same end effector at least three separate times for various reasons. The end effector was too narrow, didn’t fit in the carriage, and spacers snapped. The elevator also had to be removed from the robot in order to put some tube plugs in. Some people have very strong thoughts on the elevator…

This is how several parts of the week felt...

Once Week 6 had wrapped up, we (for lack of better words) hit a stand still. There wasn’t much mechanical work to be done, there were minor design changes, finishing electrical, and programming was starting to get their hands on the robot.

As a very involved student, it’s nice that my work is 99% done and I can take a much deserved breather!

Student Musing:

Being on a small team is great! You get to learn so many skills, such as confidence, leadership, delegation, technical skills, how to build relationships, and most importantly, how to say no. I took on fundraising as a somewhat new student, who wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I did fundraising for about 6 months before I joined design and fell in love with the technical side of robotics. However, I was still expected to do fundraising because I was the only one who knew how it should operate. The pressure and burn out eventually got to me, and I was forced to learn how to say no, because nobody was going to say no on my behalf.

This was an incredibly valuable lesson. Possibly the most valuable lesson I’ve gotten out of the FRC program, and I do think that everyone should learn this lesson. I decided to reform how the fundraising process works so that every student on the team feels/is responsible for the health of the team. This shift did set us back financially ever so slightly, but seeing the newfound pride and joy that students have over their fundraising contributions was worth it.

Student Musing Part 2:

Topic change! Woo! 

I absolutely love the practice field! It’s where it starts to get real. You can see your robot in action, what needs to be improved on, what other teams have done, and more. Personally, I feel that the magic of the practice field is the collaboration that comes with it.

I was sitting in the corner hunched over my computer working on CAD, and admittedly trying not to cry in frustration. Kelly, a mentor from 1778 Chill Out, noticed my frustration and having known each other from past interactions, he offered his help. Kelly's calm and helpful demeanor was just what was needed in the moment, and I actually managed to get stuff done instead of being stressed out. 

This five minute interaction with another team reminded me of one the of the many beautiful aspects of the practice field. We may be opponents, but we are also teammates who seek to help and teach. Especially at the practice field, every team is in a somewhat vulnerable state with fragile robots, and we are all willing to drop everything we are doing to help another team. As the kids say these days, “real recognizes real”. I simply can’t do the beauty of the practice field justice, it’s just magical.

Design:

Not a creature was stirring… Not even a mouse…

Just kidding! It’s been quiet on the design front since CAD has finished up. We’ve been working on our technical binder mostly while fixing up some small interference issues we encountered once assembly started, making some 3D prints, etc.

Our technical binder is one of my favorite things. One of our team goals is to win the Quality Award for the 3rd year in a row, and a big piece of that puzzle is having an in depth technical binder. Here, we outline our team goals, how we arrived at specific strategic choices, our technical process, prototyping, design, analysis, optimization, features of subsystems, and so much more!

It’s been a little bit of a struggle to encourage people to work on this since teenagers can’t sit still and press buttons on a keyboard for a long time. It’s coming together slowly but surely.

Electrical:

Starting early on a Sunday morning, the electrical syndicate got together and powered through a five hour day, solely dedicated to wiring the robot. They used rubber grommets in strategically placed holes allocated for wires, and carefully fed the wires through. By the time the secret electrical meeting wrapped up, 90% of the wiring was done!

Clean wiring!

With a quick power test, everything had lights!

Now comes the fun part… waiting for Mechanical to finish building and installing the elevator. 

This actually didn’t take long! The elevator was on the robot for good by the end of Monday. They made haste by measuring twice and cutting wire down to what would be the correct size for wiring up one side of the elevator, and down on the other side. I’m pretty sure I heard somewhere that 95 ft of wire was used for the elevator? Once the measuring and trimming was finished, they took black and orange electrical tape and encased it to prevent a stray wire. Wednesday they added the finishing touches!

Mechanical:

GO GO GO!

By this point, mechanical was crunching faster than an elevator with chain issues. The first version of our chute (not so subtle foreshadowing) was completed and our mechanical lead was tasked with taking a dremel to the sharp edges and shaving down a stupid amount of aluminum. He kept asking if anyone wanted any glitter.

Some free hands were tasked with assembling and installing the finishing touches on the climber, which has been named the “elephant”. (If you know, you know.)

Putting alignment arms on the climber.

Smaller tasks were being wrapped up and we finished the week by taking apart the end effector again. Stupid, stupid bearings. They kept falling out and I think I’m going crazy all over again just thinking about it. Anyways, the purpose behind taking it apart again was to make longer shafts. After standing around and debating like 12 angry men, we finally accepted that our end effector was simply too narrow for our liking. We cut, faced, and tapped shafts that were ??.???” longer. We installed them in the end effector anddddd, the end effector doesn’t fit.

Time to take it apart again! 

This time it fit after cutting off ??.1?? more inches.

Let’s put this thing together one last time and rush over to the practice field!

At some point, you've got to bring what you've got to the field.

Programming: 

I literally can’t speak on this whatsoever.

Editors Note: I'm fortunate that these Weekly columns end on Saturday. Software had started testing and tuning the robot! This post is already full length without me filling in every little line of code and variable that changed, so I'll give the highlights.

The elevator motors are fighting each other.

The elevator motors are still fighting each other.

The elevator motors are both spinning in the reverse direction. and still fighting each other.

It works!

Similar story with our End Effector - we have two Time of Flight sensors so we can tell when we intake a game piece, but we kept intaking and ejecting the Coral in one swift motion. Eventually we got it tuned and could collect and retain a Coral game piece.

Our elevator setpoints were *chef's kiss* lovely.

Lots of time well spent, next to the practice field.

Then we tried driving, and the field oriented drive kept changing heading as we rotated, making driving rather unpredictable.

All good things to find out Week 7, rather than competition! However, it was the end of Week 7, and we still had not scored a Coral with this robot...

End Editors Note. Back to our irregularly scheduled programming! (Ha, get it! We're in the programming update section! You're glad I explained that.)

Business and Marketing:

This is the bulk of this week's update!

Our Business team has transitioned from raising money and increasing our community awareness, to scouting! Some veteran students collaborate with less experienced students to decide on important aspects of matches that we want to collect in our scouting through game analysis. Once some research is done, they have to skim down all of the things we want, to the things we need. Scouts make fewer mistakes when there is less on their radar. Therefore we try to make scouting as simple as possible so there aren't any mistakes in our data, and we get the best reflection of teams capabilities. There is quality in simplicity. 

Once the list of the necessities is completed, we play around with how to format questions in Jotform in order to make it as easy to use as possible. Our goal is to make it intuitive, and informational. When you’re deciding on important scouting decisions, you always overlook something. As a Drive Coach and the person who does alliance selections, I have a knack for knowing what we need and what we don’t. I want to march onto the field with the data that my team worked so hard to gather, and know that I’m making an informed, and accurate decision. 

Personally, my biggest pet peeve is when teams have to phone a friend while on the field…

Thankfully, week 0 had started. What a convenient time to practice scouting! While watching matches and having students fill out the form, some bumps can be smoothed out. “What is this question asking?” or “How is this rating system set up?” All of these questions can be answered with a little tweaking on the form.

Quote of the week:

“Why is the elevator in the garbage?”