Mahr’s Metal Beavers
We’re about to play our 6th match — and we think everything should go perfectly. we have made no major changes since the last match, so hopefully…
We currently rank 38/55. it was 29/55 earlier, but some teams must have won matches. Hopefully we’ll do well enough on this match to bump up the ranking a little.
We just finished our 5th match. The robot drove just beautifully, and the autonomous mode driving was perfect - it went nice and slowly, and hit the opposing wall after almost exactly 15 seconds. It seems that there may be something wrong with the pneumatic cylinder though, as they never tried it. of course, they never stopped under a ball, so they may not have tried. we’ll have to find out.
EDIT: The cylinder works, they just weren’t able to use it due to other robots hitting us. So everything worked perfectly!!
We’re about to play our fifth match at the Pacific Northwest regional competition. We’ve been having trouble getting the pneumatic piston to work, but the problems seem to be corrected now with some significant design changes. We think the drive system is ready and the pneumatic actuator works, and we have code for autonomous that should just drive forward slowly, although that has not yet been tested.
We’ll just have to see how it goes.
Today was the starting day of the competition where all the teams unpacked, fixed minor (and major) problems, did 3 practice rounds, and met the other teams. We did not make it to our first practice round, and during the second round our arm unfortunately broke into a few pieces, and was not fix-able. After the second practice round we had our safety inspection, and we were a few pounds over weight so we just took the entire arm and all of the arm hardware off completely. During our third match the flag pole fell down and we ended up accidentally using it as a skewer against other robots. Now we are back at Franklin fixing a few things and making out robot legal.
Today was the first day of the competition, however, we are not actually competing today, just fixing the robot and playing practice rounds. We were unable to attend our first practice competition because the robot was not ready. Our second practice round was very interesting — the arms fell down and wouldn’t go back up. A malicious robot then ran them over, resulting in their destruction. The third match was by far the scariest. The robot started hybrid period by spinning uncontrollably in circles. It then proceeded to get another robot stuck, followed by the flag pole falling down, the flag falling out and the lap indicator vanishing. Right now, we are making repairs, in addition to fixing the few things that the safety inspectors have asked us to modify. At this point, it’s looking like we will not be using any form of arms to “herd” the ball, however, we are reasonably certain that we will be able to knock balls off of the overpass. In a second-to-worst case scenario, we could just run around the track quickly, and do nothing else. In a worst case scenario, our robot may do nothing at all, however, this is highly unlikely.
Some of the robots here from other teams are amazing! There are some very creative designs, including a variety of lifting and catching devices, a small robot that does nothing but go in circles around the track at high speed, and one robot that manages to launch balls over the overpass. One particularly tall forklift-style robot tipped over when it made a (successful) last-ditch effort to get the trackball back onto the overpass.
Hopefully we’ll have a better functioning robot tomorrow…
So it’s that the news,
We have shipped the robot, now it’s all about button making.
Buttons and getting people’s permission slips filled out and returned.
And working on this thing,
As I kept whinning that we needed to post things but I’ve only just
started today.
Anyways,
that’s about all we’re upto.
Maybe we’ll post more in the mean time to Comp…
Probably not,
The robot shipped several days ago. We were sad to see it go… parting is such sweet sorrow. We’re planning what to do when we get to the competition and have some more time to work on the bot. There’s hybrid mode code to be tested, motors to be changed out, and so on.
We’re into button production full speed ahead. There are 4 different styles of buttons, but if you want to see them, you’ll have to visit us at the competition. We also have some comics in the works that should appear on our website soon.
The robot MUST be gone by the 19th of February. That’s tomorrow. At exactly midnight, the robot has to leave. So, we are all panicked since the robot is not ready to leave. We have spent all day fixing little (and big) problems, preparing paperwork, checking for compliance with all rules, and generally panicking about everything. Testing has been delayed, but at this point we are thinking that the robot will still work okay at the competition, although perhaps not as well as we had hoped for.
Today we went to the church to practice driving more, and to pick drivers. After a few interesting errors we were able to get the robot functional. As we were narrowing down the drivers, there were a few unfortunate mishaps.
While driving, the robot hit the wall pretty hard quite a few times, most of the time it hit the bumpers, but the last time while Danyelle was driving there was no bumper on the front. The robot instantly turned off and the main power cord was shaken loose. Now it seems that our frame and a few of the bolts on the wheels are severely bent, and although the frame is mostly fixed by now, it will never be the same.
We have learned a valuable lesson, ALWAYS have ALL the bumpers on while driving the robot.
As the shipment date gets closer, we hurry to finish our robot. The arm is nearing completion, and the pneumatic actuator is going well. We are starting to run out of room on the board itself, and therefore searching for safe mounting room elsewhere.
On Tuesday we tested driving the robot around chairs, and found many known and unknown errors. Most of the people on the team got to test drive the robot, and only a few small parts fell off at random. We have also mostly figured out the status light! yay!
