Posts Tagged Team 449

Success and Failure at the 2009 Battle o’ Baltimore

Aug 26

Posted by Eric in Competition

With the internal controversy surrounding 449’s attendance at the Battle o’ Baltimore, I’m glad to say that we did in fact attend. Summer events are always hard, with most people on vacation or simply not motivated enough to make the 45 minute drive from DC to Baltimore.

The goal of this offseason event was to give the younger members of our team—the rising juniors and sophomores—a jump start into running the robot without us old farts. The power’s been in our hands too long, and we’ve gotten too comfortable being in control.  The drive chain is loose? Not my problem. Here, have a wrench. It might not be the right size. Engineers have got to fend for themselves in the wild world of robotics.

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First “Build” Meeting of the 2009 Offseason

Aug 6

Posted by Eric in General

“If this explodes, we’re going to have video of your epic demise.”

So commented one team member on my attempt to run a CIM motor off an 18v drill battery using 22 guage wire.

Such was the atmosphere at our third summer meeting, hosted at my house, in preparation for the Battle o’ Baltimore. Our main goal was to replace the robot’s sub-par shooter with a simple hopper and roller with which to “dump” orbit balls.

The dumper design was considered during competition season and mostly built (as our witholding allowance) but was scrapped in favor of a catapult. We thought it would be a good idea to give it try at the Battle. After negotiating our way into the backroom at school, we collected the dumper scraps so the dumper could have a second chance at life. Disassembling the shooter was done quickly, and resurrecting the dumper was not difficult. 80% of the work was completed the first day.

The four people who decided they didn’t want to go home for the night slept with the robot in the basement. We were back at work 10 AM Sunday morning. A few bent pieces of flat stock and more than a few zipties later, the dumper was in working condition. For the rest of the day, the hum of tools and robot work was accompanied by the clatter of pool balls and sharp pings of air hockey pucks. A few mechanical bugs were worked out, which entailed a new gearbox and mounting plate. Some minor adjustments ensured that our rear wheel chain would stop ejecting itself.

Most students floated between game-playing and robot-building, but some chose to work on other projects. The fate of the programming subteam was discussed at length, and design work was done on the rumored “arm” that will be the pinnacle of our training program. Some people even found time to cut the pieces for a second modular battery charger.

While the bulk of the work is over, we will be meeting here again this Saturday. This time, the focus will be on the robotic arm and offseason projects, as well as some administrative work for the upcoming school year.

And just so you stop wondering, my ad-hoc wiring job didn’t explode.

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Ferocious Zip Ties

Aug 4

Posted by Ben in Mechanics, Programming

WARNING: Never hold a zip tie by its tail (the long, flat end) and use it like a whip to hit someone with the head (the square end that you can feed the tail through).

This happened to me on Sunday where, upon arriving, I was attacked by a bored freshman sophomore. It kind of stung, but I didn’t think anything of it… until I started trying to work on planning pre-season lessons. That’s when I noticed my hand was bleeding in several places (5, to be precise). I had to go upstairs to have Eric’s mom put some antiseptic on my hand (I don’t trust sophomore boys to keep their hands clean. Heck, I don’t trust me to keep my hands clean).

Needless to say, I was kind of pissed.

On the plus side, I managed to work with Daniel to get most of the training schedule for next year set. We have 12 days this year, up from 9 last year (just how school scheduling works out) (hooray!).

Training this year is going to be a LOT more hands on than last year. Half the sessions are reserved for hands on practice, including wiring and programming a robotic arm and building a set of drive trains. Hopefully everyone will come out of training ready to head straight into Build Season (or at the very least, know the difference between a bolt and a nut).

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New Additions to Website

Aug 4

Posted by Scott in Website Development

We’ve been trying to get quality content up on the website, emphasizing resources for robotics and programming. I put together version 1 of an article system, which can split a long page into multiple sections based on header tags, and automatically generate a table of contents. We’ve written a few new articles, but we’ve mostly just been trying to get old content online. The current article list can be viewed here. Most recently, I put up Eric’s Subversion Crash Course.

We’ve also been working on a new index page, which would look somewhat better, have more content, and be more inviting overall.

Finally, we should have breadcrumb navigation soon.

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Battle o’ Balitmore vs Robotic Arm

Jul 27

Posted by Ben in Competition

So to go to the Battle o’ Baltimore this year, we’re going to strip the top of our robot and replace the catapult (which worked intermittently at best) with a new dumper design that we’ll spend the next few weeks building.

We also need, statistically speaking, about .5 more people to be interested in going to Battle o’ Baltimore to go (take the chance of a person going as the number of people; two people who are 50-50 for going or not count as 1 person going together. It works.) The reason for needing more people is simple; drivers shouldn’t have to work in the pit full time and vice versa (”That was a tough match, time to take a break… oh wait, I can’t because I have to fix the robot.”)

The other thing we need is a new coach. I’ve coached at competitions the last two years, but I’ll be out of the state at the time of the competition. I apparently have an uncommon idea of what coaching should be (compared to other coaches, not compared to the people I coach): the coach shouldn’t ever yell, except to be heard. The players will do a good enough job punishing themselves for mistakes, and don’t need you to rub it in. Whoever replaces me as coach will have to show him/her self to be calm in general (or at least whenever I’m watching).

I’ve noticed that Bo’B always seems to be rather time consuming; prepping everything, designing, building, programming (plus, I’m not too sure about the new NI stuff… last time we tried to download it took several hours before our laptop would talk with the cRio). Granted, Battle o’ Baltimore is pretty fun, but it always means less time for other things.

This year, I wanted to have a robotic arm built, one of those 5 axis contraptions that every robotics team should have. Scott mentioned this arm in the previous post (about our first summer meeting). Designing it would be an exercise in spatial thinking, CAD, and working with different motors for our younger members, building it would take precise machining that most of us could use some practice with. But the best part would be using it to train brand new electronics and programming members every year. And wouldn’t it be great if some programmer were bored and, say, taught it how to bring us sodas? Oh… and did I mention how awesome it would be?

Anyway, we should end up designing and building something like that regardless of whether we go to Bo’B (it just might run longer into the start of school), but this brings me to what I really, really want to build: a motorized joint that is in a feedback loop with a joint on a human (knee would be most useful), such that it enhances motions of the joint. Systems of powered joints like this exist already, and allow people (read: “soldiers”) to carry people on their back. Without noticing any weight. We probably couldn’t get that sophisticated, but you have to admit it would be cool to try. Maybe next summer…

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Meeting #1 at Katherine’s House (July 20)

Jul 20

Posted by Scott in General

We met – for the first time this summer – at Katherine’s house yesterday, to take apart an old robot and discuss pre-season activities, particularly training.

All of the rookies present felt that the training programs for the various subteams needed to be changed, if not drastically altered. All the subteams are going to be having a more hands-on approach to training in the coming year. We will dropping the long, theoretical lectures during which people were actually taking notes (always a bad sign) and moving to short, basic how-tos followed by now-dos.

The sophomore training program will be more focused on designing the parts than it will be on actual construction. In addition, there will most likely be less of a distinction between people who are in electronics and people who are in one of the mechanics subteams. People will go to whichever activities suit them without being limited by their subteam choice. This does not apply so much to Programming and Teque subteams, which are sort of “in a different world”.

Many ideas for the specifics of training came up and were shot down. The rookies will not be building a cart as their pre-season project (too complicated). They will not be building complete robots and then competing in a mini-game (not enough time). The mechanics training program will most likely be separate from the electronics and programming training program. One idea that was not really shot down was that we might have a robotic arm built, and then re-wire and re-program it every year.

Also floated was the idea of competing in the Battle o’ Baltimore again this year. This one was generally accepted. The decision to use LabView, a graphical programming language, instead of C or C++, was maintained.

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Risky Plans

Jul 15

Posted by Scott in Programming

It’s been a strange week – it seems that I decided, once I was almost done with the search engine, that it was time to start some more crazy projects. The disease is catching – Eric has his own project, not yet approved, that even I consider to be extreme. We won’t go into it here.

My three projects are, in order of dubiousness of completion: an in-house listserv to be hosted on ogodei, an IRC server, and an analysis system for FIRST team data (not yet online). The first two will both be linked to the Eric’s “Team Management System” – which is what makes them especially challenging. The third is designed to find patterns (defined by me as a lack of randomness) in team data, including sponsors, team size, geographic location, and performance at competition. Obviously there are some trivial patterns with which I can test the system: “hey! most teams in the D.C. region go to the D.C. regional!” My hope is to find something slightly more useful than that: “hey! everytime ARL decides to sponsor a team, Microsoft joins them the next year!”

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New UI Uploaded on Website

Jul 5

Posted by Scott in Website Development

After several months of waiting, previewing, fixing, and starting over, the new look of the Team 449 website is almost finished. The beta version has been uploaded, although work continues on it. The main changes that will be made soon are:

  • typesetting
  • the left navbar
  • add statusbar

Improvements are still being made and bugs are still being ironed out, but for now, the site validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional.

It is our intent to eventually create an HTML 5 version that can be viewed by compatible browsers. (CSS3 will be included no matter what browser is being used, since it causes no adverse effects.)

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New Web Interface Being Developed

Jun 20

Posted by Scott in Programming, Website Development

A new interface is being prepared for deployment on the website soon. It will dynamically load scriptaculous, so that the page will appear to load as quickly as it does now while still being able to take advantage of fancy javascript rendering effects. The status bar will be improved along with overall layout, and a search bar will be added. A preview of the new UI is available here (this version is not up-to-date, it is simply meant to give the viewer a feel for what will change).

On an unrelated note, Mozilla released a release candidate for Firefox 3.5 yesterday, which has significant HTML 5 support. No browser can claim to have full HTML 5 support for a while, since W3C says that HTML 5 will not be finalized until at least two major browsers have support for it.

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Running wires through the ceiling

Jun 15

Posted by Eric in Electronics

A few days ago, I worked with some of the newer members of our team to run a pair of 16 guage wires about 50 feet through the school’s ceiling.

This cable needed to cross two walls, one of which had never been unprofessionally penetrated before. Like usual, we taped the wires to the end of a fiberglass pole (the bendy kind used for road markers) and tried to poke it through peacefully with the bundles of ethernet cables. The pipes they passed through were gummed tightly, and eventually we gave up. We ended up pushing it through the oversized hole for a ventilation duct (though not oversized enough to make it easy for us.)

When we got into the back room, myself and others completely covered in bits of tile and ceiling dust, we tugged on the end of the cable. It fed through nicely for about three feet before being pulled taut. We were left with the two wire ends dangling 8 feet in the air. So much for the ten feet of slack I had been sure to allocate.  Fortunately, This new predicament forced us to place the stereo unit on an elevated platform, saving valuable floor space in our tiny backroom.

We then assembled an audio patch cable to connect the backroom server, quentin, to the stereo. I brought in an old cable with salvagable Radio Shack jacks on it, and we hacked it apart. After some soldering difficulties that destroyed the plastic hoods for both connectors and some greuling tests of the cable (”ohming-out” if you will), the cable passed QC and was installed.

“Okay, playing, turn up the volume slowly!”

And voila, music from the other room.

For ten seconds, then it cuts out.

“Dang, my Java program crashed. I’ll work on that later.”

While Stephen continues to work on that, I will have fun using mplayer wirelessly via SSH from my pocket-sized tablet.

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