After spending Winter Break busying outselves with our Mini-Build Challenge, meeting other teams, and preparing for the 2010 season, the team was excited and ready to go come kickoff day. The game Breakaway, modeled after soccer in honor of the World Cup, was released in the morning and we started our new team tradition, the Strategy Conclave, the afternoon of kickoff. We had an intense discussion and decided what strategies we wanted to implement before taking inventory of the Kit of Parts.
The day after kickoff we decided what type of robot we wanted to build. After several more meetings about different drive train types, we decided to keep our base simple, because a more complex structure goes beyond our knowledge. Therefore, we could focus on perfecting our kicker and tower mechanism.
The rest of the first week was spent designing, and our design was released the next Saturday at our design review. The Manipulator and Chassis groups then worked off of the design which was given to them. For the next few weeks (excluding finals week, of course) Manip perfected the kicker mechanism (after several prototypes) and chassis wired the electronics and plumbed a pneumatics system, for the first time in 2489 history. After testing our robot’s kicker and watching the ball soar over a bump, we couldn’t wait for the Fembot’s practice day!
While at St. Francis, our robot was one of the most active on the field, a huge difference from last year when we brought our robot without its manipulator. We had some trouble with the chain, which we fixed once we got home. We put the robot in the crate, knowing that we’d be working in the weeks ahead to finish our tower mechanism. After ship day, we worked diligently and managed to complete our tower mechanism before SVR.
Thursday morning, we began to attach the tower to our robot. Some of the holes didn’t line up, so we spent some time machining the tower to fit on. Once that was done, we rushed to inspection, only to find that our robot was .6 lbs overweight! After some “swiss cheesing”, the robot was up to specs. The only problem was with our pneumatics system. It worked sporadically and either had issues staying under the 60 psi limit or wouldn’t turn on at all. By the end of Thursday, and with the help of Jimbo, one of the inspectors, our robot had passed inspection except for the pneumatics issue.
Friday began with a lot of troubleshooting. Since we were in the 2nd match, we needed to finish inspection early, so we eventually opted to disconnect the compressor in order to at least be driving in our first match. In-between matches, we continued to locate the issue, with the help of Mike from 115 and Mrs. Rhodes from 100. We had bad luck in a lot of our matches but kept the robot on the field and never gave up. By the end of Friday we still hadn’t solved the problem with the pneumatics but were confident that we would soon.
Saturday morning we had everything fixed. It turned out that there were a variety of problems, which included poor connections, loose PWM cables, and a staple in the digital sidecar. We used the kicker in our matches to kick the balls over the bump! At the end of qualifications, we were ranked poorly, and didn’t get picked by an alliance. However, all of us had fun, and can’t wait until next year!
Great things that happened this season:
- Our kicker, when fully tensioned, kicking the ball in an arc and landing 10 feet away!
- Getting a pneumatics system working for the first time in our team’s history
- Meeting all the awesome people that helped us get the robot working
- Having 10 dedicated new freshmen to bring a new perspective to the team
- Completing the tower after careful planning and designing
- Things to remember for next season:
We need to spend more time practicing with the code, and give better driver feedback to the programmers
- More time needs to be spent designing and planning
- We need to make offseason projects more challenging to increase our knowledge base
- Everything should be tested after any changes are made
- We should only say things that would make our grandmothers proud
- We need to increase our member base from the different FUSD high schools