FIRST Robotics 2019 - End of Week Five

Week five.  Most years this is the tough one.  The deadline for completion looms near but everyone has been working hard for a month and frankly is starting to get a little tired of the robot, the coaches and each other!

So we usually dial it back a bit saving some energy for the home stretch.  This year, alas, in Week six we are losing about half the team to a Music Department trip to New Orleans.   

The week as it happened.

Monday.  No practice, school cancelled.  There is usually no doubt about this call but on this occasion it may not have been warranted.  The day started out 40 degrees and big puddles.  It was projected to freeze up during the day and make the world a big skating rink.  It was not all that bad, but....no work done.

Tuesday.  Practice on but it snowed like the dickens and we had kids needing to leave early.  Also a critical system might not be legal under the rules of the game.  Desultory experimentation with alternatives.

Wednesday.  No practice, work space unavailable.

Thursday.  No practice, school cancelled with the approach of another wave of snow.

Friday/Saturday/Sunday.  In FIRST robotics there is an odd and interesting tradition called Ri3D, which stands for Robot in Three Days.  The way this works is a bunch of former FIRST students now in college or the working world, take a look at the challenge when it is announced and then spend 72 hours of kamikaze building to come up with a workable if basic machine.  I think they do this for the fun of it but also to give real teams some ideas to think about.

We are not quite down to the necessity of a Ri3D build but we expanded our build hours over the weekend.  In fact, I just put out start times, work goes on as long as it is productive...

Friday.  Good crew on hand.  Now you might imagine that the point of last minute building is to build, not to take apart.  The display of wire and tubing spaghetti is especially bad here.

But a significant engineering issue we had to solve was counterbalancing that long arm with too much weight on the end.  The solution was a pneumatic cylinder pulling 60 pounds backwards.  It made a pretzel out of the first attempt at a linkage.  Here is the gearbox/arm/cylinder assembly back together having been redone in a beefier fashion.

By the way, nobody else in FIRST robotics builds these ridiculous, top heavy, industrial strength robots. I ask the kids sometimes, I plead with them actually, "why can't you just build a normal robot?"  They say that wouldn't be enough fun.

Saturday.  Scheduled to be a work til the work is done day.  But a productive crew got the necessary things done before 5.

It is still unclear if our vacuum system will be allowed under the current and somewhat nebulous rules.  So several kids have been working hard on alternatives.  This foam "bee hive" can just be slammed into the middle of the disc.  It holds pretty well.

As in every previous season, we have a functional robot one week before we need it.  Actual drive practice is happening.  So far things are pretty crude, but improving.

A FIRST robot is not really done until the bumpers are done.  Here's a nice set finished and installed earlier than in any previous season.  

Sunday  Fatigue had set in pretty hard by this point.  We ended up with 15 hours of work spread out over the weekend.  But progress continued.

Here's the robot in competition ready configuration.  The mess of wires and tubes needs some additional attention but at least now everything is labeled.

And here is sort of a "stretch project".  Modular control box for electronics.  Designed, laser cut, welded and assembled by students.  It is called The Black Box.

As always the final touches come from a kid lingering on just a bit longer to finish things up.  Currently, pun intended, we can tell when the robot has latched onto the ball by listening to a change in the pitch of the whining vacuum motor.  That won't work in the arena.  So our main programmer figured out that the motor's current draw changes when a secure seal is established.  The robot can tell us that.  The way he figured to do so was by making the gameboy controller that the arm operator is using just start vibrating!

More snow ahead.