Hello all!

Tremendous effort from all teams culminated in a running robot last night. I think it was safe to say that all parties were pretty impressed by the initial capabilities and everyone is looking forward to the fine tuning we'll do this week as we wrap up the robot build.

This is not to say we're done with the build! Still need to machine more sprokets and clean up wiring. I will bring my label maker tomorrow night and it would be good for the electrical team to get labels on every wire running into the electronics package.

Several of us worked on a method of cleaning up the wiring from the turret. Randy had a good suggestion that we need to mock up. If we can make it work it is possible it will make things a little simpler. I will pick up a few parts to try. One of the possible implications would be that the camera might have to be moved slightly to one side. Stand by.

Keep on running! Only a week left!

Dean

Tonight, Nick, Skyler, and Cassandra designed and cut out another foam groundhog. It was dimensioned at 5 inches by 21 inches. We cut it out so that it was (basically) circular. But, before we decide what material we want our final groundhog to be made of, we are going to fine tune the brush/bristle groundhog; then we will test it so that we can figure out which one will give us the best results.

On sataurday we plan to have a small group of about three people complete ALL the balls. In other words sew them and rivet them.
The groundhog team will be createing groundhog possibilties and will hopefully create the final design for the hopper.
The turret team is planning to test the turret shooting at a moveing target sooner or later.
The chassis team claims to be done so they will be helping all the other teams.
Good luck and let's get 'er done!

We made really good progress last night. We connected the turret and ran it on circles. Runs smoothly. We did have a gear slip on the encoder shaft so there is work to add a set screw. Looking to possibly test tonight with the encoder in place.

Manual turret control is done, needs to be tested fully. Once the camera is added we will work on tracking the targets and turning the turret.

Elevator motor control is in place and the groundhog motor reference is added. Need to set the control.

Look to add the automated tracking system and determine how we want autonomous to function completely.

Looking forward to making more progress tonight.

Practice field is 95% complete!
The floor is down and the corner station is built. Still need to work on the boarder and the middle human player station. Teams will need to take extension cords with them when practicing. There are lots of outlets just not where you will want to drive from.

Just sharing from the experiences digging through the blog code. Before looking through the code I had never looked at PHP before. What I wanted to express is learning multiple languages is a way to gain skills to be able to quickly look at a new language and be able to understand what it is doing, even if you never have programmed that language before. Almost all languages share common structures, styles of design, and operations.

So, moral of the story, learn as many programming languages as you can in your career as a software developer. Read, research and try languages on your own. With that background it will increase your skills and give you abilities to quickly learn other languages.

Our blog was compromised and infected with malicious code. Thanks to Jerry a co-worker of mine for pointing us in the right direction. I would also like to thank our programming mentor (Randy) for spending about 4 hours last night finding the malicious code. The malicious code has now been removed making our blog safe once again. We are continuing to investigate what exactly the code was doing. We know that it was accessing a server in Russia. We have some information on the server and continue to look into the issue. Our goal is to understand what if anything was installed on user’s computers.

Our blog is once again safe and will be monitored closely.

Thanks for your patience during the time the blog was offline while we resolved this issue.

Bullbots

For the ball harvester I think we will need to slow the intake roller down to a speed just slightly faster than our robots max speed. If it spins to fast as we come up to a moon rock it will kick it out because of the slick floor rather than pulling it in. Of course this is just a theory and needs to be tested. So if we want to spin the intake roller to match the robots max speed what RPM would we need? Below is an example of the math that I used to calculate the RPM. Some of you math wizards should make sure this is correct.

Formula for circumference is: Circumference=3.14*diameter
The formula for inches per second based on RPS (revolutions per second) and the circumference of the wheel is: in/s = RPS/circumference
RPM=RPS*60 In order to get RPM we need to multiply RPS by 60
Diameter = 5 Lets say our intake wheel/brush has a diameter of 5 inches
5 * 3.14 = 15.7in
Let’s say our robot can travel a max speed of 12 feet per second. Now let’s convert that to inches per second: Inches per second = 12 feet per second * 12 inches per foot = 12 * 12 = 144in/s
Now calculate the RPS: 144/15.7 = 9.17 RPS multiply by 60 for RPM and we get 550 RPM

The software team started into the development of the final version of the program. Switched to the advanced template after the labview software updates were applied so we can flash (deploy) the program to the cRIO for use on power up.

We also went through and talked about software requirements and the process of using UML use cases aka user stories on how we expect the robot to function. We went through what an actor is and how the actor interacts with the use case.

We are targeting to complete all the manual interaction by Saturday, then work on the automated parts (autonomous and automatic camera targeting).

Dashboard design is almost complete for the physical part, the software part still needs to be developed.

Jose, James and John made great progress on turret modifications on Monday night. Why modify the turret? Due to the elevator position the turret drive motor and pinion gear would have extended beyond the 28x38 max size envelope. With the turret modifications we now have total flexibility on turret motor position. Well done, "J" team!

Last night we continued to work on the turret limit switches and encoder. We test ran the turret motor and were impressed by the RPM we have (<1 second per turret revolution!). We may want to test it with an unmodified gearbox. The limit switch bracket was completed, though it still needs to be mounted. (James is all over it!) We are still looking at encoder solutions and Daniel has designed a gear to drive the high-res encoder.

Sherbot take note: I did not have any small screws to mount the limit switches. I can pick some up today, but will not bring them until tomorrow night.

Thanks team! As Cody would put it: "Get Ballin'!!"

Dean