Tuesday, February 2. 2010

 

What we ate for Dinner!  Another meal from Andy’s mom (Supermom) Heather (our dedicated meal organizer!):  We had striped hotdogs, macaroni and cheese, tossed salad, mixed fruit salad with delicious whipped topping and cookies!

Notes from the Integration Meeting!  Parentor Val and I have gotten into a routine which is wonderful for me!  Val takes the notes.  And then she puts them into the Wiki and then I copy and paste them here into the blog!

Drive-train sub-team took apart the robot, painted it, assembled base chassis and motor mounts.  They will need some extra hands to help tonight.

Programming – The code for upper mechanism is done, but not tested, and without overrides.  Autonomous mode is being coded.  Joystick buttons have been defined.  Programming met with both electrical sub-teams to coordinate various things.  Need to test the upper mechanism code, work on the code for the hanging mechanism, and troubleshoot the autonomous code.  Camera is still back-burnered at this point.

Electrical – They have determined positions of battery, board, and cRIO on the robot.  They worked on how the electromagnet will “know” it has grabbed the kicker (limit switch design).  Need a robot to work on!

Controls has finished sheet metal design and sent to Harris.  They will start wiring circuit board.

Mechanical 1 has finished the hanging mechanism in Inventor and tried to send it to Harris, but need to send it again with dimensions.

Mechanical 2 did a bunch of Inventor work, but needs to do more drawings and get parts made by Harris.

Field sub-team has finished building goal frames, working on memory foam padding for goals.

Tuesday counts of Build Season Hours!  Thanks Mentor Leann!  Students:  1925, Mentors:  1397, Total:  3322.
And Team Leader Larry is still not any more confident that the robot is progressing and will be done on time.

Tonight’s Seen and Heard!

For some reason the song that seemed to be continually playing in the shop was “The Final Countdown.”  I can’t decide if that is depressing or encouraging.  But since the “upper” shop had tunes, Mentor Amy demanded tunes for the “lower” shop where the field is being built.  She cited statistics that the productivity dramatically increases with tunes.  Tunes were delivered.  Massive output ensued.  Well anyway they completed all of the side ramps and part of the ball return unit.

Tonight we had ten computers in Inventor doing mechanical detailing and one computer in use for electrical detailing. That’s a lot of details!  Mentor Tom C was trying to coordinate the new details with the BoM and with the materials already ordered.

The drive-train is looking good!  The paint has dried and the frame is together with the motors mounted.  It clears the bump nicely, forward, backward and at various angles.  The students were cutting spacers from copper tubing with a pipe cutter.  What a cool little gadget!

The controls group was soldering components for their AWESOME control board.  Most of the buttons and switches have been installed except for the super secret really cool ones.

The electrical main group was scouring the design for space for the electrical components.  They have enough space, but it isn’t prime space, so they are looking for cleaner alternatives.  One thing that may help is that…

The programming team has upgraded the CAN bus from it’s “can’t” status to a “maybe.”  They have found some mistakes in the code which were causing the CAN bus errors.

Team hair update:

Mike H. shaved his chin.
Crystal’s hair has new red and orange in it.
Lizzy’s hair is blue.
Shauna’s hair is purple and blue.
Parentor Lee’s hair is missing.

Celebrating the cool looking Drive-train! (caramelldansen)

 

Posted by Cynette Cavaliere

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