Omega Robotics

Today, we went to Burlingame High School and participated in our first qualifier of the Skystone season. This was the first ever qualifier for the majority of our team and we were extremely excited!

We did well in this qualifier despite the not yet updated robot. We went to this qualifier with our Tatooine robot design and did not expect to win anything, but instead went for the experience for the younger members of the team. We ended up bringing home an award!

We took home the think award for our excellent excellent, industrial scale engineering binder. Our detailed accounts of our meetings and outreach took much dedication, and we hope to keep up the good work with our binder and documentation.

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Meeting 13

Date: 9/18/2019

Time: 1:45 PM – 6:00 PM

Attendance: Nidhir, Vishrut, Aravind, Amaan, Amogh, Aditya, Josh, Afra, Trinity, Ananya, Ashley, Rohan, Prakash, Betty, Josephine

Goals

• Code: Begin programming and testing basic move methods. Begin teaching new members.
• Design/CAD: CAD practice and begin designing our two passthrough robot ideas, Virtual 4 bar and side mounted elevator. 
• Mechanical: Build the OX-01-H drivetrain
• WebDev/PR: Continue discussion/hopefully finalize new colors/branding standards (if needed), new logo, complete update of the website.
• Business: Begin sending out sponsorship letters/packets.
• Project Pick-up: Complete the high throughput intake and the main trash holding area. Continue work  on website. 

What was accomplished

• Programmers were able to install Android Studio and Java while creating a Git account, also getting access to the project files. (Amogh)

Mechanical

• We disassembled the entirety of the old drive train, sorting usable screws and bolts from unusable parts.
• Then, we started assembling the new drivetrain that fit the needs of the Skystone challenge. (Prakash)
• We were able to learn what to use and how to disassemble certain parts of the old drive train, since it was easier to use one thing instead of something else to disassemble certain parts. (Atul)

Programming

• We held sustainability lectures. (Vishrut)
• We set up code to generate motion profiles. (Vishrut)

design

• Looked at other teams’ robots and FRC robots with designs similar to those we were thinking of using.  (Vishrut) 
  • Passthrough designs: virtual four-bar and side-mounted elevator  (Vishrut)

other

• Finished the team roster and added in the last few remaining members
• We worked on sponsorship letters, and started to email some companies. (Afra)

notes

• Sometimes it gets very chaotic due to so many members being in one space, meaning that we aren’t progressing as fast as we’d like to. (Josephine)

reflection

• Programmers were able to get the assistance they needed to help complete the installation. We were able to understand the core principles of motion profiling, and the linear and iterative programs. (Amogh)

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Continue reading “Qualifier 1 Preparation (Meetings 13-40)” →

Meeting 9

Date: 9/9/2019

Time: 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM

Attendance: Justin, Nidhir, Rebecca, Trinity, Aditya, Afra, Amaan, Amogh, Ananya, Ashley, Josephine, Kathy, Lavender, Rohan, Sriteja, Atul, Vishrut, Prakash

Goals

• Meet the new team members.
• Introduce this year’s challenge and our team’s structure for the new members.
• Set up a carpool system.

What was accomplished

• We all introduced ourselves (And I swear everyone’s gotten so much taller over the summer? Or maybe I’ve shrunk.) 
• Nidhir, Justin, and Rebecca talked about the different subgroups within our team and how the new members could decide which area to focus on. They also talked briefly about the programs to download depending on the area of the robot each member wanted to work on.
• We made a really weird carpool system which will work for now because most of us are able to come to the meetings on our own.

Notes

• Apparently all the new people want to be on the mech team, which will probably be a problem for programming since we no longer have our head coder from last year. (Ananya)
• There’s a problem adding some of the freshmen to our group chat, which we need to fix. (Ananya)
• As of now, there are over 15 kids on our roster, but usually some drop out within the first month, so that should not be an issue. (Ananya)

Reflection

• Overall, the meeting was pretty successful. We got everyone inducted into the team, but we need a little more time to make sure everyone is comfortable and committed. (Ananya)
• We should make non-mechanical roles sound more appealing so that we don’t end up with an unbalanced team. (Ananya)

Continue reading “Introduction & Sustainability Lectures (Meetings 9-12)” →

Date: 9/7/2019

Attendance: 7:30 AM – 2:00 PM

Attendance: Nidhir, Justin, Trinity

Goals

• Have fun and meme.
• Get hands on experience with the field elements.

What was accomplished

• We met with some of our FTC Discord NorCal buddies (Wilson from FTC 3791/14417 and Andrew from FTC 11311).
• We watched the game video and tested the stacking tolerance on the stones and approximately how much force is needed to move the foundations.

notes

• We ate Jolibees, the first time any of us have eaten there, and the food was pretty good. We ordered way too much, but we got Trinity to eat.
• We also had one piece of chicken left over so we gave it to some random FTC student at kickoff. 
• Trinity has an issue with being too quiet and doing Duolingo instead of talking with her friends.

reflection

• Kickoff was a fun way to start the season.
• Kickoff was also pretty far away, but the hands on experience gained made it all worth it.
• We hope that our field ships soon so we can start prototyping on real field elements. 

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Meeting 1

Date: 6/13/2019

Time: 2:00 PM – 7:15 PM

Attendance: Nidhir, Justin, Rebecca, Sriteja

Goals

• Teach people design of robots.
• Implement Roadrunner, FTC Dashboard, and REV Extensions.
• Get the Monoprice Select Mini 3D Printer working.
• Begin designing a double extension robot (horizontal and vertical extension) to gain design experience.

What was Accomplished

• The Roadrunner quickstart library, which includes its dependencies, FTC Dashboard and Rev Extensions 2 was downloaded.
• Initial FTC Dashboard implementation succeeded, we can access the FTC Dashboard by going to the web application.
• Roadrunner should theoretically work, but currently has a multitude of issues that we are working with Ryan (creator of Roadrunner/FTC dashboard) to resolve. 
• We went through about 30 robot reveals, and explained what we should learn from each one, helping more people to understand competitive robot design.

Mechanical

• We decided that because all of our scoring mechanisms are currently non functional and broken (intake axle is out, slide stringing is broken, and flip servos are broken due to wires being cut), we would remove the top of our robot. This leaves us with a drivetrain only to easily test and implement Roadrunner. Due to our modular design, this was incredibly easy to do (only took about 15 minutes) and the drivetrain was already independently wired to a REV expansion Hub. We should continue to keep our designs modular. (Justin)
• The Monoprice Select Mini that we received from Nidhir’s friend does not boot reliably, the LCD screen will often flash and the motors will hum, but it will not fully boot. It only correctly booted once, and once it was restarted to level the bed, the issue persisted. I reached out on the FTC Discord, and Michael from FTC 4410 offered to reach out to his friend who had similar issues. Let’s hope that they have a fix, otherwise we may have to look to alternate ways to get our 3D printing done. (Justin)

Programming

• We’re aiming to implement Roadrunner for cubic/quintic splines, motion profiling, and to standardize our robot movement. FTC Dasboard also has some great features, like on the fly PID coefficient tuning. However, even though getting FTC Dashboard working was relatively simply, we ran into issues. Our tuning Opmodes displayed strange behavior, from the velocityPIDTuner throwing (Error: User code threw an uncaught exception: NullPointerException – Attempt to invoke virtual method ‘void com.acmerobotics.dashboard.config.variable.CustomVariable.putVariable(java.lang.String, com.acmerobotics.dashboard.config.variable.ConfigVariable)’ on a null object reference) when hitting start to other Opmodes like feedForwardTuner able to start but not doing anything or outputting any telemetry. Thanks to FTC 8367 ACME Robotics for creating FTC Dashboard and Roadrunner and Ryan (8367 alumni) for helping out on the discord. (Nidhir)

Design

• Seeking to practice and refine our design, we’re going to be designing in CAD accomplished robots from previous years. We started off with FTC 9971’s (Winning Alliance Captain, Detroit Worlds) robot, and we’re trying to replicate its most important features (one mineral wide intake/outtake and transfer) in CAD using the parts that we have on hand. (Rebecca)

Notes

• Dusty is still cute and we’re hoping that STREAM education gives us a fiscal sponsorship. (Justin)

Reflection

• We were pretty efficient today, 5 hours seems to be the golden time for meetings: it’s long enough to get everything we need to done but not long enough so that fatigue doesn’t set in. (Justin)

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Continue reading “Pre-Season Preparation: Meeting Entries # 1-8” →