ditto anne's post.
THANK YOU to anyone and everyone who made this possible.
we DID it, guys! :]

that said, we leave for portland wednesday and have plenty to do before then.
on top of anne's stuff we need
-a complete bill of materials
-stuff for chairmans //not until svr
-programming compilation
(wow, it's reflex to comment out stuff now. eek)

woodie flowers and chairman's are getting submitted tomorrow.
now go catch up on sleep and relax until school starts.

SHIP SHIP SHIP!!!

WE SHIPPED THE ROBOT!!! :D

A BIG THANK YOU to all our mentors
especially Emily, Jimmy, Doug, Karlin, Tiffany, Jessa, and Sophia (even though she's not really a mentor) for being there on the days before ship
(hopefully I didn't forget anyone in my sleep-deprived state)
(and thanks also to Schnurlee and Julia for showing up :D)
thanks to the programming team for staying up all night to fix code
thanks to Castilleja for letting us use the gym (even though those carpets were gross)
thanks to Mr. Rockman for being at school on the day of ship and doing paperwork and stuff
thanks to the freshmen for fixing the crate and purging the project room being useful
thanks to parents who stayed in the gym late at night
thanks to the build team just for being so awesome and cool (jk)
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
(^.^)
i'm so happy that the robot is shipped
and without much of a hassle, really :D
it definitely was less stressful than last year


unfortunately, not everything is done yet (=.=)
STUFF TO DO: (please comment if i left stuff out):
1. chairman's, woodie flowers, etc (by thursday?)
2. packing for portland (contact Schnurlee or Julia for packing list)
3. Jimmy needs to make the things that go with the globe motors for the gripper (5x)
4. stuff to bring to portland to show judges (Nandini and I started a box today of our prototypes)
5. do we need another portland meeting or are we good to go?
6. autonomous? is it working okay?
7. Tiffany suggested we make sorbothane templates for the gripper (as in precut sorbothane, metal plates, extra rivets, a functioning riveter...)

okie dokie. I really hope I didn't leave anything out.

to dooooo in the next five days

in no particular order

-gripper/arm
-get the GTS functional (THOUGHT: the reason abbott and me couldn't get the code working? were we using the shitty gts?)
-kill switch. mount it. somewhere nice.
-e board cover?
-numbers on bumpers
-signage
-TV remote/IR board? mount?
-get carpets for gym
-talk to chapman about moving the crate for us
-CHAIRMAN'S/WOODIE FLOWERS
-put bumper holes in chassis
-make the sad speed controller happy

hang in there eat lots of post feb 14 candy and we'll pull through.

wednesday

hey
sorry i haven't reported back for a while

so coding's going fairly well. we've gotten a fair amount of testing time for the robot, which is obviously a good thing. we've tweaked the drive code, and, as of tuesday night, we strafe!
the robot does what we want it to do (now.) we drove in confined ideo space and it was fairly easy to control (though i was not the one driving).

i'm really loving the whole two-electronics-boards thing.

hybrid period work has begun. :) is someone donating a tv remote?

we kind of, uh, busted a GTS. emily suggested plugging the gts straight into the distribution block. whoooops. we're hoping it's salvagable.

not sure exactly what build's been doing. there's a spiffy little gripper prototype and jimmy finished his awesome mount thing today.

possibly robot names: benjy, timothy... definitely a boy robot.

bumpers have been painted bright green. do not attempt to spray paint them next year, you will only get a little giggly and dizzy and have ugly bumpers. instead, paint-paint them first. :)

the portland meeting was today, forms and check due friday.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO DRIVER: PRESS THE BUTTONS ON THE JOYSTICK HARD OR THEY WILL NOT WORK.

5 days to go, people! hang in there. we'll pull through. i'm excited.

thank you to all our amazing mentors. today, thanks to the ever-helping jimmy, emily, karlin and tiffany. you're all amazing. we thank you thank you thank you.

monday and tuesday

MONDAY

over the weekend we went to look for last years bumpers and we only found one!? yeah. and it was the 28" side, too. grr. wonder where the 2 long ones went? anyway, we salvaged the wood and t-nuts from bumpers from 2 years ago, but we bought new pool noodles b/c the ones from 2 years ago looked TERRIBLE. unfortunately, all the wood was 28" long (no 38" ones...where did they all go?!?) so we're just going to have some places on the robot w/ noodle and no wood. i'm sure it'll be ok. we asked emily and jimmy and both said it was fine, so it'll be all good :D

on monday, i'm not sure what programming did (they went to ideo) but build built 3 spanking new bumpers! YAY! we had fun with the staple gun (safety first!) and the canvas that wraps the bumpers smells really bad. but anyways...we almost made them wrong. NOTE FOR NEXT YEAR: T-NUTS GO ON INSIDE, NOT OUTSIDE!!! (aka the pool noodles go on the side with the t-nut sticking out of the wood)

allie also cut out "1700" out of foamcore today (for our stencil when we spray paint the bumpers!) but since she used an x-acto knife, it looks a bit...well...funky. ahahhaa. so tomorrow we're hoping to lasercam it at ideo! :D



TUESDAY

today caroline, nandini, and i went to ideo during lunch for jimmy's "first five minutes". ideo has these lunch meetings every tuesday and jimmy had to present something for his first five minutes so he wanted to show the robot :D. it went well but when nandini was driving it, we realized 2 things were wrong:
1. the robot wouldnt turn/go sideways (it was driving worse than on saturday)
2. the front left wheel (NOT the front right wheel) was turning a lot more than the other wheels (and it was off the ground kind of)
so ummm...yeah. :(
these 2 problems might be related (like the robot won't go sideways b/c one wheel isnt touching the ground) but in any case...it must be fixed! :( waaah.

on a happier note, allie lasercammed 1700 out of this really cool black plastic-y thing (acrylic?). it is SO COOL. so i suspect we will be spray painting our new beautiful bumpers soon.

also, nandini and tiffany were thinking of a gripper design. we were going to prototype it (lasercamming) but the computer in the lasercam room wouldnt import tiffany's DXF designs :( so we couldnt lasercam the gripper parts and we were very sad. emily is going to try to figure out whats going on...

AS OF RIGHT NOW WE ARE 76 POUNDS (w/o battery, w/ tower, electronics board, all 4 wheels, chassis, etc)
so that means we still have 44 pounds left...
(it sounds pretty good but i'm not sure how much the gripper and extra motors will weigh...)
and we got our teflon-coated jackscrew FINALLY today!!! :D

thanks to sallie's dad for bringing dinner today! (annie really really REALLY liked that pizza)

saturday

today was just one of those robotics days

lots of driving, perfecting code, adding code...
anne and nandini would probably have an update on the state of towers/grippers/arms
annie and tobi wired up a spiffy (and organized!) electronics board. thank god, the other one was starting to get a little scary.

coding:
we added a brake. well, two, but one is ghetto to fit with our theme and SHOULD NOT be used.
do not press the trigger. it extremely reverses the direction of the motors. if lightly tapped, the point was that it would be an immediate brake.
the one you should actually use is the thumb button, which will set everything to 127.

we also fixed the turning issue

except then doug/karlin decided that since our motors were all strangely wired up we needed to fix that... so equation-writing and brainstorming ensued. i'm not sure if we came up with anything by the end of the day.

bumpers! kind of a neccessity, we've realized... hehehe. so i think people were getting wood cut, etc, for that. hopefully we can acquire some pool noodles asap. bumper party tomorrow?

oh... heheh we managed to SNAP the end off the oi radio. eek. they are apparently extremely flimsy. however, it still somehow works, so yknow, we'll just go with it. and at competitions, we plug into the master system, so it doesn't matter too too much.

is anyone planning a end-of-build party again?

we have succesfully made our mark on ideo. twice.
and fingerblasters are fuuuun. :) we're not sure how ideo people manage to get any work done.

by the way, the robot needs a ghetto name. seeing as it, uh, is extremely extremely ghetto. ideas in the works.

10 days and counting? or maybe it's nine?
eek.

we'll get there - if nothing else, we should be able to speedily drive around in circles.

thank you thank you to emily, doug, jimmy, karlin, eric, and tiffany
also to the mukherjees for awesome food

11 at castilleja tomorrow, probably at ideo by 1?

We're Driving!

Click on photo for link to video (see thumbnails at bottom of photo album).

long time no blogging...

yay to anne for picking up my blogging slack!
it's been a while. yeah. sorry. hopefully i'm back for good now.

well, with 12 days to go, we're in pretty decentish shape!
we have a chassis with four wheels and four gear boxes (yay for easier chain tensioning!). it sort-of kind-of drives. as in, it drove on saturday with emily's funny button-pushing code.

the code in the debuggingblahblah folder does NOT really work when downloaded. the speed controllers do the blinking dance. BUT we are "in the loop." so maybe the pwms are getting overwritten by some default code crap?
BUT when we downloaded emily's code from saturday, three out of four wheel moved and speed controllers were steady state. we determined that there is one unhappy (and so labeled) speed controller, which prevented the last wheel from moving.

coding's... getting there. we have one file (drivingoffcases.c) that has a buuuunch of functions and our two large case statements. we still need to write the part that talks to the pwms and then the drive_routine function which will bring them all together. also, uh, remember to reference all that in user_routines.c. it doesn't miraculously do that by itself. we'll continue work on that.

oh, our basic plan: the joystick axes will be y for fwd/bwd and x for turning (although i don't know if we can actually turn - we may only be able to spin. hm). and then the aux buttons will let us SLIDE!

build: i think they're getting there on an actual real gripper/tower design? i don't really know details. i heard something about jimmy welding soon, though, so that's definite progress!

yay for doug for getting the bad tether fixed, and the autonomous box (i know ginna was working on that with him in the ee lab today) and working some serious magic on the gts resistors generally being cool like that.
thanks to karlin and jessa for programming awesomeness
and jimmy and emily for always awesomeness
and ginna's family for the awesome sandwiches
i need some awesome sleep...

4 gearboxes and we need a gripper... :(

YAY I'M BLOGGING!!!

well yesterday (monday) we went to ideo and i guess we decided to use 4 gearboxes on the chassis instead of 2 so we can be a crab now. so jimmy and the build team took apart the gearboxes for the 109874023809282th time (jk) and jimmy had to make the other gears in the 2 extra gearboxes skinnier and he had to make new mounts for the gearboxes. (poor jimmy) and i heard doug did something amazing/magical with this year's screwed up GTS (or something electronics-y)

and today jessa and karlin came today to help with programming :D
and build tried to make a prototype of the gripper that had 2 arm things that moved parallel to each other. also, the leadscrew should have arrived today (hopefully we can see it tomorrow when we go to ideo!)

so for tomorrow i think we (as in build) should start on the final arm thing and definitely continue prototyping grippers and stuff. and as for programming...well i don't really know.

thanks to the billimoria family for bringing really yummy food! :D

COMPILED CODE!

so i got the other code compiling too...
:)
apparently we can't have a 255 x 255 array. because that's hella big.
so now it's 5 by 5. but at least it compiles!

so maybe we should come up with a new idea for drive code? or something without a 64000 value array.

also, we're eating the leftover amazing pizza from il fornaio. yum yum. it was even better yesterday, too.

officially tonight's last post

i lied before, we're meeting at ideo tomorrow.
around 5.

schedule

damn, i'm really forgetful tonight

this week's schedule
monday: 4:30-9:00 at IDEO
tuesday: 4:00-7:00 at Castilleja
wednesday: 4:00-9:00, going to IDEO at 5:30
thursday: 4:00-7:00 at Castilleja
Friday: 4:00-7:00 at Castilleja
Saturday&Sunday: 11-5 at Castilleja

oh, and for anyone interested, fomf's this weekend.
i actually do think that's all for tonight.
gnight. get some sleep, yes?

rip scotty

and on saturday, they gutted poor scotty.
so he's brainless and heartless now (but we have his guts ahahahahhaaa)
at least the ramps should still deploy?
he was a good robot. slightly-to-majorly ghetto, but still. a good robot.

monday 1.28

wow.

so today, anne, caroline, erin and i went to allan steel (thank you marsha!) and met doug and emily there, where we bought 38 pounds (including some extra) of 6061 aluminum extrusion.

headed over to ideo, where four of the builders set about making sure the mecanum (pr: mecknm? meck-AN-um? meck-uh-nm?) wheels are properly functioning.

jimmy welded us a beyootiful shining chassis! well, actually he was still going strong when (sniff) we all had to leave. but on wednesday, i bet we'll see a gorgeous chassis!
hopefully we can get it up and driving by wednesday night, our next late ideo night.

on the coding side, i know erin and caroline are basically still receiving the same frustrating error message. but i THINK i know what the problem is... the same one i had.
you can't call a .h file in both user_routines.c as well as your functionfile.c. so i solved that problem by taking the #define and really necessary shit and just putting in it filtering.c, and then not calling filtering.h in that .c file. i only called in it .c.
after a good chunk of frustrating debugging, my code finalllllllly compiled! whether it actually does what we want it to, well, i suppose we'll find out? printf's are lovely things.

i believe the new toughbox gearboxes (to take two motors in one, i think?) should be coming in tomorrow night, so a couple builders should head over in the afternoon to get those all set up.

thankkkkk you to doug emily david tiffany and jimmy for all being there tonight.

all in all, a productive night. i'm happy.

sunday

coding today...
me (sherri) tried to take the joystick values and make a filter
erin and caroline tried to actually write drive code

except that debugging is a PAIN.
so basically, that's all
i'm not sure what else to say, really

there's an up and runnign electronics board

DRIVING TOMORROW NIGHT?! hopefully.

January 26, 2008 IDEO

The mecanum wheels are done. Five of us went to IDEO and used the arbor press!!! (My dream has come true) We took the wheels apart in a speed contest which I won with lots of time to spare. We pressed the new bearings into the wheels to get rid of some of the weight of the bearings from the inside of the kit wheels. Nandini and Emily worked with the jack/ lead screw so it now is attached to the van door motor(?) Emily drilled a hole in it on the lathe. (we checked on her every five minutes) Then she threaded it and screwed it onto the motor shaft. There is a platform attached to the lead screw so that someone can put pressure on the lead screw to test the torque of the motor. The platform is also a possible way to attach the lead screw to the arm. The motor still turns with Nandini putting most of her weight on it. This was basically how we spent three hours at IDEO.

Saturday 1.26.08 at Castilleja

So those of us that didnt go to IDEO yesterday worked on the electronics board. David and I set up the electronics board, while the recruits learned to solder and clamp-smush. Once we got the board running, we realized that the motors were not both going forward when the joystick was forward (obviously a problem). So we tested a number of things. the speed-controllers, the motors, the connections. Only to learn today that they were just oriented wrong on the table top. Also, we couldnt figure out why when the motors were going forward, one set of pwm lights was green (full-forward) and one was red (full-backward). Today we figured out that the motors were turning in opposite directions when they were at 90 degree angles from each other because when they were on top of each other they would be turning the same direction. and so finally we had to solve the problem of them starting at different times. Since a motor being backdriven takes more torque to start, one motor was always lagging behind the other. So we are now trying to fix that in our code. now its sunday around 1:00.

wheels

(From ginna)

Wheels
On wednesday David Anne and I put together the mecanum wheels with the bearings from last year's wheels inside. We measured the width of the bearings and the width of the spacers that were inside of the mecanum wheels and the bearings were 3mm short. To temporarily take care of the change in width we layered tape onto the plastic around the bearings. Since the bearings have two sides of plastic parts that could come loose, we decided to use three of the holes to hold the sides together with screws and bolts. The other three holes were used to hold the complete wheels together. We then noticed that the sprocket must be spaced apart from the wheel so that the chain won't hit the wheels.

i totally can't believe i forgot about this...

EMILY'S AWESOME CLAW THING.
because she was "bored", she lasercammed (sp?) this awesome actuating by a slider claw thing out of foam core. it is SO cool.
we attached it onto the 80-20 elevator. definitely have to have some sort of thing to fold up the claw or at least make it smaller to fit within the 28-38-60 initial box.
it's really really cool. it makes me so happy.

wednesday

wednesday mentor night!
much thanks to emily, doug, jessa, and david. :)

doug helped us go into more detail about the arrays. how to make 3d arrays, etc. jessa went over what algorithm we currently use to turn the joysticks, and how it's actually incredibly inefficient. only like half of all joystick positions are actually legit.... a bunch of them all mean the same thing. so maybe we can take the "Real" values and stretch them out.

i feel like i understand the theory and concepts of what we want to do to get the thing driving smoother. i just want to start doing it! like the ideas make sense, but i couldnt sit down with a laptop and just type it out.

chassis stuff is started! we have cut lists, and sketches and dimensions. allan steel run monday afternoon? a couple of us will go, be back by 4ish, probably.
defffinitely 1 layer this year. we measured a piece of last year's aluminum and it's 4oz/6in with a 1/8 in wall. that is HEAVY. hopefully for at least part of the bot, we can use thinner stuff. maybe one sixteenth?

david was doing some mecanum wheel stuff. i wasn't doing that, so i dont have details. maybe i can rope anndini/ginna/whoever into posting about that.... there was some sawing and mounting and such things.

i'm really excited to get this stuff up and running. i second the idea that these wheels are "pimpin". they are awesome. coding them is going to be fun.

ideo run tomorrow, around sixish? emily said that jimmy wants to start building next monday. so i guess after we get parts, we'll shimmy on over. :)

thanks to goel family for chaperoning and tasty food.