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Chairman’s Award Video

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Currently, the media and business teams have teamed up to work on the video for the Chairman’s Award. We have been conducting interviews with team members to provide different perspectives about being on the team.It has been fun to hear stories and explanations from our team members of why they participate in robotics, and why they love it. Through the filming journey, we have experienced several different technical difficulties that have hindered our progress. This includes cameras without space, running out of battery power, and sound difficulties.  Luckily, our team is resilient and we were able to move forward, finding the solution as completing the majority of our footage on an iPad.  Our next step is to compile the footage and begin editing to create the video.

Chairman’s Award and Shadow Bot

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Today we did more interview for the chairman’s award. Things are going well. We cleared up the audio with a new mic and fine tuning of the mixer board. We also transferred the 2013 cRIO to the new shadow bot. We added components to the new shadow bot. We built the winch mechanism that pulls back the catapult. We added the reversible bumper covers. The programming team worked on vision code and the networking code.

Week 4

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We’ve entered our fourth week of build season and things are clicking along. We’ve finished the mechanical part of the scoop, and catapult and the pneumatics are being added. A shadow robot is being built in case our first robot breaks.The programming team continues their update of the software. While the Business team and drive team showed off this years chassis to the FLL team at Highland Park Junior High.

Things are Coming Together

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Today the team accomplished a lot.

The field elements team started construction on the goals and is almost done with one side of the goal so far.

The build team attached the lift and the catapult together using a four-bar linkage. They are working steadily to construct a winch mechanism to prime the catapult. They are attaching the pneumatics as I type. A small team is also working on creating bumper covers. This year we plan to make the bumpers more easily switchable which is an engineering feat in and of itself.

The programming team flashed the cRIO with the new 2014 image and calibrated the ultrasonic sensor to aid the driving team.

Ready for launch

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The balls are flying as we continue to test our catapult. Today we are experimenting with loaders and how to get our loader into position without exceeding our 20 inch limit. The scoop has to be able to go from on top out robot to on the side of our robot. We are looking into using four bar linkages to do so. The chassis team is hard at work attaching the battery, bumpers, and the wireless router to the base of the robot. The build team is also working on the winch to crank back the catapult. Today we worked more on pneumatic systems to power both the loader and to release the launcher. We are experimenting with the ultrasonic sensor, we plan to use it to aid the drivers depth perception. The programming team is working on a lot of projects like running code on the robot, testing the ultrasonic sensor, and working on the website.

Yesterday we worked on the robot at our mentor Jeremy’s house due to school being closed. We experimented with four bar linkages and tested the maximum torque of our robot pushing a couch with teammates on it.

The torque test video is on our YouTube channel here.

Como Summit

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On Saturday members of the Highland Park Robotics Team attended a summit meeting at Como Park High School to discuss strategy with out St. Paul teams. From this summit many teams received help with any issues they had been having with their robots. Back at school though our team was working away at building the robot. The team did many things as our build team captain summarized towards the end of the day saying :

“Chassis Team: Drive train is functional, and the wiring is complete. as of right now the right encoder on the gearbox is not functional, but this might change before the end of the meeting. the bumper mountings are done, and the noodles are being secured. the cloth covers are not done and plans are being made to make them.

Next meeting: bat box, finishing bumpers, finishing touches and transferal to driver training!

Launcher Team: finished catapult assembly and performed a test fire! (Woo!) Made concepts for a quick release mechanism. worked on how the forklift will work and futzed with lots of ideas.

Next meeting: Determine appropriate width for catapult frame to allow attachment and movement of fork assembly and cut to size.  Work towards finalizing fork design.

Pneumatic Team: worked on concepts for the pneumatic lifting system for the forklift. tried to find a trigger release. settled on four bar linkage for loader movement. adding a spike relay.

Next meeting: debug mechanical, electrical, and code components.”

Moving along

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Robotics is in full swing!

Everyone is working away at building programming and driving. The programming team is playing with vision code trying to connect the raspberry pi to the network and decrease the latency on it. Build team is adding bumpers to the chassis and deconstructing the pre-season beverage fetching bot. The drive team is practicing their maneuvers and trying to encourage everyone to have a try at it.

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Chassis Complete, Design Decided!

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Today we made a lot of progress in designing and building our robot. The robot has a ramp on the front and two wheels on either side that help pick spin the ball up on top of the robot. We settled on this designed after much controversy on many topics like how we should carry the ball, how we should launch the ball, how we should pick up the ball. But in the last hour of practice a small group came up with a succinct design that incorporated the best of both designs.

We plan to add to our design and continue revisions of it throughout the build process.Today we also built the stock chassis that we purchased through FIRST now we just have to wire it up. The business team worked away at finding and emailing possible sponsors and sent messages to some 50 possible sponsors. Last but not least the programming team worked on the network code for the raspberry pi. we plan to use the raspberry pi to run vision code that had previously been too large for the FMS.

Going virtual

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Tuesday afternoon the highland park robotics team went virtual. With school having been canceled, due to weather, we took to the interwebs in order to be productive on our day off.

We divided into business team and build team for the first half where we things specific to our teams. Later we came back together as a team and discussed then the programming team went onto their own channel. Over the course of our chat we decided that we would test impulse vs catapult, groups and leaders. The programming made progress on ultrasonic sensors. The business team made a list of business that we wanted to contact about possible sponsorship.

Prototyping

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Today a small group of robotics members met today at the hack factory to prototype chair ideas. we found a stretchy cloth material and then constructed two y shaped frames to hold the cloth between.

y-frames model

We tested scooping, launching, and catching. We found that the cloth creates a better scoop because it gets lower to the ground than the chair. We found that when launching a lot of force is need to launch the ball from the frame to a goal. When catching we found that we will need to allow for some give in the mechanics of the frame so that the force from catching the ball is dissipated. with the rigid wooden frame part of it broke and so future constructions will have to be made out of metal with rubber or elastic spacing to allow for motion between the connection of the frame.