Friday 12/16/08

Attendance: Ian, Keegan, Penelope, Nick, Kevin, Jarred

Agenda:

• Replace the motor for the second stage of the arm
• Replace beta wheels with legal ones

Kevin: I worked with Penelope to replace the upper arm motor and mounted the new motor controller.

Penelope: helped Kevin to replace the upper arm motor. We also mounted the new motor controller, replaced the illegal “beta” middle wheals with the new ones, and put Velcro on the back of the NXT for mounting. 

Keegan: tightened bolts.

Penelope: Watched Ian work on the programming for the LEDs, and learned a bit about how the LED program works.

Nick: re-made prototype scoop for robot added taller sides and shortened the floor area as well as in creasing the scoops incline.

weekend scrimages

--written on a piece of paper Sunday, January 18 2009 at liberty high school during the scrimmages by Penelope Biggs--

to-do
--> mount main arm motor*
-need smaller C-channel or hacksaw
-->put various arms back on the robot
-->put compass back?
-->rewire/connect everything
-->Test

*could have it on the main frame, but that leaves the motor's tabs vulnerable.
found a piece slightly longer than the front bumper + length needed to mount motor
PROBLEM: bumper piece like: n, piece needed to be like: C
if we rotated both pieces, then the bumper would be slightly higher, but otherwise the same. then we could use longer C-channel
PROBLEM: the C-channel is tool long (it messes with the battery)
cut (really hard) or move the battery
PROBLEM: will color sensor get in the way?
no.
PROBLEM: "otherwise the same" means the actual bumper ends may be slightly farther apart
PROBLEM: can you mount touch sensors sideways?
answer: the problem with that is that it leaves the touch sensor vulnerable. Solution: mount it so the open end of the C-channel points inward.
we ended up going with the above design
the problem with the bumper spacing was solved after some experimentation, but one of the touch sensors was striped. we replaced it.
i don't like the bumper because it is normal on one side and thin on the other. i don't think it is big enough all the way though.


DONE
--> tightened & put back arm wheals
--> Tightened arm post
--> put another screw on and tightened big gear on arm

--everything else that happened is below--
Saturday, Jan17-09
Attendance: Ian McBride, Kevin Burns, Penelope Biggs, Tucker Brennen
the first problem was to solve the clicking problem with the first and second arms.
the top one is what happens when you put all the torque one one side of a C-channel with minimal support. to fix this we set up the gears like the ones on the second arm. this way the torque was spread out on both sides of the C-channel. the problem with this was we weren't sure were to put the motor for the main arm. (we fixed this on Sunday, see above)

the second arm also clicks. this was because the motor was not supported very well and was moving apart from the big gear. our (temporary) solution was to put a zip-tie in between the motor gear and the big gear so the they would be held together and not skip.

the Left motor stopped moving. we replaced it with a motor that worked, but drifted to the left. this will make our autonomous code useless until we can replace that motor.

when testing our robot we noticed that the back bumpers prevented the robot from going up the ramp. we took them off.

Sunday, Jan18-09
Attendance: Ian McBride, Penelope Biggs, Kevin Burns
it seemed that every time we got something working something else will fail. after we got the first arm motor mounted and working, the servos failed. the tailgate would slowly twitch back up to '0'. the bucket twitched as well. the reason for this was that the negative wire fell out.

when that was fixed, the second arm failed again. the reason was the zip tie holding it together stretched under the stress, slipping off the gear. they came up with a solution, but that would require drilling though some pieces, something we could not do at liberty high school. we were at a stand-still.

Electronics 12/14/08

Attendance: Ian

Agenda:

• Test LEGO Lamps hooked up to the NXT motor ports
  
• work on redesigning a circuit to use 8LEDs with only two digital bits on the prototype board

Today I met with Jeff and John; the team has been coming up with ideas of how to use light and sound for decoration. My first expiriment had three lamps each plugged into a motor port and I set them to different values to find if we could control brightness.  Even with a power of 5 the light was at it's highest intensity.  Upon looking at the code again we noticed that PID control was on, so because the lamps dont provide a response we had the same problem that we had with the DC motors earlier, after turning off PID control the intensity now changes relative to the amount of power we apply. 

After some simple testing of the lamps we took a look at a circuit John had made using 6 LEDs and the prototype board.  This circuit was very limited and simple because it used all six digital bits, one for each LED.  We came up with an idea that uses 1 IC and only two of the digital bits to control 8 lights.  It works because the chip passes the original value on to the next pin with each clock cycle so we can enter a pattern 1 bit at a time using an input pin and the clock pin.  We can program the clock to be pretty much whatever speed we want. So for example we can turn all the lights on by turning the IC's input pin on and then doing a number of rapid cycles of the clock.  All that remains after I assembled the circuit on our prototype breadboard, is for our team to program the nxt to talk to these lights.

Saturday 12/6/08

Attendance: Kevin Burns, Terry Adolphson

Kevin: We worked on demoing the robot for the FLL teams; we also got wired and programmed the arm. We found that the mounting of the second arm motor caused the arm to start clicking and fall. The robot was able to climb the ramp and hold it down on its own. We found some problems in the arm in that it can hit sensitive parts of the robot and can get shoved under the robot.s

Friday 12/5/08

Attendance: Kevin Burns, Penelope

Agenda:

• Replace bad motor
• Replace beta wheels
• Mount NXT

Kevin: I worked with Penelope to replace the upper arm motor and mounted the new motor controller.

Penelope: helped Kevin to replace the upper arm motor. We also mounted the new motor controller, replaced the illegal “beta” middle wheals with the new ones, and put Velcro on the back of the NXT for mounting. 

Tuesday 12/9/08

Attendance: Penelope, Tucker, Nick, Kevin

Agenda:

• Rebuild the Feild
• Maintain the robot
• Continue designing the manipulator
• Program with Robot C

Penelope-helped re-set up the field, then put tape down where it was missing.

Nick wrote his first robot C program and is planning to learn more in the future. :D

Tucker tightened the touch sensors, reinforced one of the motor controllers, switched the drive motor channels, and re-mounted the switch.

Kevin: I helped with the changes to the robot and the setup of the field. Later I worked on the FRC bunny-bot.  I found that the original bucket would work with almost no modification.

Meeting 12/2/2008

Attendence:
Ethan, Tucker, Kevin, Penelope, Nick, Jared

Agenda;
1) Overview of changes
2) Harvest parts from betabot
3) Design bucket cont.
4) Rewire*
5) Add panels to field
6) Work on mounting Hardware*

-Ethan dedrickson

Harvested a motor hub from beta bot to test with lift system gears the hub from the beta bot didnt fit but the other hub we had found did so problem solved. -nick

PENELOPE helped Kevin fix the robot.

Jared drilled and screwed the new arena wall panels together. I also glued PVC parts of the panels together.

Kevin: I disassembled the end of the manipulator, realined the gears, found mounting locations for the NXT and motor controler, and remounted the manipulator motor.