FIRST Robotics. Getting it Done.

Robot in its final form.  Clean lines, immaculate wiring layout.  It drives well.  Software has preset the location for all the necessary pickup and drop off positions.  Heavy duty trigonometry was involved.  I've not seen the final work on autonomous routines but am told "it works".

In a few days we'll find out.

Hard work on display.  Lots of it.

The Robot Symphony

With heroic efforts the FIRST team has recovered from a mechanical set back and a blizzard that lost us a practice.  There are still Unknowns and Undones but likely just an average batch of each for an Earliest Possible Event.

We decided on a bit of levity.  We have lots of musical talent on the team.  Software and music in particular are obviously in synergy but even our fabricators have the discipline and precision to make good things happen.  

So we convened what I suspect is the first ever Robotics Team Symphony Orchestra.

It was directed by one of our alumni who runs a music school.  The sound engineer was an alum from the original 2015 team who is a professional musician.   The good video and sound is being worked on for future video use.  We got a bit of improv, some sound effects and the premier of a short piece created just for this purpose.  

The 5826 Symphony Orchestra doing a practice run through of "FRC"

And the guys in the back row (guitar, drums and keyboard) jamming.  I should point out for copyright purposes that our robots only run on DC....

Busy Times

I almost never miss my three times a week posting schedule but this is a crazy stretch.  The robotics project had a near death experience last week that required a major rebuild.  This sets everything back with only a handful of days left to complete the work.  Oh, and an apocalyptic snow storm is about to clobber us.  

Well at least the big ski race up at Hayward should be happy.  

I mean of course the Giant Ski race tomorrow night, not this "other event" with the tiny little normal skis that happens over the weekend

I was able to make the World Premier of the Giant Ski movie.  Choice entertainment.  Another showing this Friday if you happen to be in Hayward.

I could promise normal times ahead but at least in the short run I'd be fibbing.

FIRST Robotics Report 2023 - Over the Edge

I've basically lost track of time.  I guess we started the week with 10 sessions left to go.  It might be more accurate to call it 12 because Saturdays are double sessions.  Mostly it is software fussing around with the robot.  Hardware and software need to work together.  If a mechanism is janky it is difficult for software to tune it up.  And one supposes vice versa.

At the start of the week we had to pull a motor unit from the practice robot for the competition machine.  So the drivers had a night of....not driving.  They spent it in strategy sessions.

Lots of things to "game".  How do you salvage something from being on an alliance that is hopelessly overmatched?  How about when you have the strong partners and your vision of how to work together is at odds with them?  Diplomacy and working together are very important in a complex competition like this one.  By the way this is a game in the true sense.  That's a 20 sided D & D dice with a list of various types of teams we might encounter.  They vary in many ways....

Side jobs.  We built a work table for the pit out of junk on hand.

Hopefully we have both robots up and running for drivers to practice with in the very near future.  Ugh....Mondays.

Many small tasks finished up on Tuesday.  We are starting to "stand down" most of our fabricators for a well earned break.  Software put in a long, hard day and at the end of it the competition robot came cruising down the hallway holding a game piece.  Still much work to do, but it was fun to see one of our drivers take the controls and make it fly......

So Thursday was looking quite optimistic.  Robot put together, basic software commands installed.  Time to drive it.  But then..things happened.

One drive module had a loose bearing.  That was easy.  But two other mechanical elements caused trouble, one making nasty grinding noises and the other heating up and seizing up.  This is not good.  Better one supposes with a little bit of time left to fix things, but every revision robs our drivers of practice time.

Our pit crew is getting good experience, so there's that......

I spent all day Friday thinking dark mechanical thoughts.   One system that did not totally fail but made some horrid pre-fail noises was this:

It's a gear motor with a 90 degree bevel gear driving the arm directly.  It had the power to do so but with how far down it was geared the final gear in the series was only moving about 45 degrees.  And those teeth needed a dentist!  So in the course of our Saturday session we built this:

Chain and sprocket drive.  Much smoother and the shaft does a bit more than a 360 rotation so the gear wear should be even.  We'll be doing a bit of tweaking and tightening but it is a much better system.  We also shored up the winch assembly.  It had issues.

So, most of the woes of Thursday resolved and we can give it back to software for a couple of sessions.  Oh, you might think the shaft in the above picture is a bit long.  It is.  So to alarm the team member who frets and obsesses over aluminum Death Rain getting down into her precious electronics we posed a photo of one of our Build Leads getting ready to unleash a shower of angle grinder sparks!  (note, he did not actually cut it this way).

Probably we'll have a couple more ups and downs in the week ahead.  We'll have one more long Saturday session to tune it up and drive it around.  Then off to tournament play....

Signs of Spring - Taste of Novacaine

On a day with the first real promise of Spring, my view from the dentist's chair.

I'm not a great patient.  It's not my dentist I'm grumpy with, he's great.  No, I am unhappy with my teeth.

We expect our teeth to be loyal, durable soldiers.

Deserters have throughout history been regarded with contempt and shot at sunrise.

FIRST Robotics Report 2023 - The Trials and Triumphs of Week Five.

Week five of Build Season can be pretty stressful.  Any system you don't have running properly....you might not pull off at all.  It's a matter of getting new ideas, getting parts, getting it to work before you have to take it into competition.  And...at some point imperfect but workable solutions become preferred, as it is critical to let your drivers actually practice with the machine.  An excellent driver with a good machine is going to do better than a less good driver with a superb robot.

Monday started with two problems.  The grabber has not been successfully mounted on the arm.  And the arm is ridiculously overbalanced.  So much weight so far out.  How much?  Well that's why you need to mount that grabber!

Fortunately we have just enough length left in our height restriction that a 3 or 4 inch projection off the back of the arm can be managed.  Here we are with just a couple of bungees holding the arm up without any motor input.  Of course this does not have the grabber claw on yet.

The claw by the way has been improved and now grabs things with vigor.  It weighs a bit more than would be ideal, but we'll just have to find a way.  It is now attached and ready for action.  The robot is also having the electronics being put on board.  The gal doing this keeps looking daggers at build team every time they tinker with structures up above.

Here's our new pit with banner.  Pretty snazzy, and a morale booster on a slightly stressful Monday.

We got a lot sorted out on Tuesday.  The pesky arm balance issue seems to be fixable with three bungee cords in the right place.  We've upgraded the grabber to the point that it does not need to get an ideal grasp of something.  Here we are holding one of the inflatable game pieces by one corner!

The wiring is going forward.  Looks a bit like spaghetti.  Should be finished on Thursday.

At this stage of the game you'd prefer to not do any drilling on the robot.  Aluminum fragments are Death Rain to electronics.  But sometimes you have to.  We deploy sweatshirts to cover things when possible.  In tighter quarters you use both a vacuum and a piece of plywood with duct tape - sticky side out - to catch any metal fragments.

Practically speaking the robot is now mechanically complete.  Another day of wiring and plenty of programming and drive practice ahead.

By Thursday we were in the home stretch of wiring, maybe another 45 minutes to do on Saturday.  We now have to find side projects for our fabricators.  Here are some nice clip on carrying handles so you can easily lift the robot off the playing field and bring it over to the transport cart.

Here's the robot at the end of the session.  Lots of pink pneumatic tubing showing.  I wanted red but it was out of stock.

A bit of robot team humor.  This is our practice robot.  The switch does not do anything.

And we have now turned over the practice robot to our drivers as software begins to prep the competition robot.  The weirdness of omnidirectional swerve drive takes some getting used to.  No better way to learn than to just keep going back and forth, back and forth....

The Saturday session is always the most productive.  We set up our pit again.  The side walls are  free standing but when the pit card and tool tote are fastened on the structure is stable.  The whiteboard will hinge on the front post.  Daytime it will have match info.  Night time it swings shut as a gate and has good night robot messages on it.

Drive practice with our test bed.  Herding game pieces around and making the run from pick up to drop off stations many times is helpful even without the manipulator arm.  Lots of skill on display today.

And here's the competition robot.  Bumpers on and all mechanical systems done.  Lots of software tweaks ahead, probably a couple of days worth.  Oh, and a close read of the rule book says the bumpers need to be lowered 1.5 inches.  Sigh.  Well I anticipated something of the sort and have alternate mounting brackets ready to install on Monday.

Good night Robot Howard.

The Giant Ski Movie - Beyond Great Expectations

Near our Up North cabin is Hayward Wisconsin.  It is among many other things the home base for North America's biggest cross country ski race.  This is a very serious event with participants coming over from all parts of the world.  Well, at least from the cold parts.

To lighten the mood a bit there are less serious events held in conjunction with it.  A kids race.  A race for dogs.  And....The Giant Ski Race.

Giant Ski involves a team of six people all strapped to the same really long pair of skis.  It requires both effort and coordination.  One momentary lapse in the latter and the audience - which seems to be mostly people from the bars along Main street - get to see you falling down and not being able to get back up.

I know some people who have taken on Giant Ski as a serious matter.  Well, their deciding that this is really the Ultimate Sport and seeming to take is seriously is tongue in cheek.  Anyway, they made a feature film which will have its World Premier in Hayward shortly.  Details below.

If you are in the area I highly recommend it.

Here's a bit of Giant Ski footage from 2019.  To get the real behind the scenes story....come see Giant Expectations.

Addendum.  Someone they have been working with on this put a Giant Ski bit on Instagram.  1.4 million views and counting.  Yikes!

Stage Mobs a Specialty

The fun, but of course equally damnable, thing about research is that you always find things you were not looking for.  It's like exploring a foreign city with map in hand and suddenly saying "You know, that side alley is pretty darn interesting".  So it is down the alley, or as it is more commonly phrased, down the rabbit hole.

I'm doing research for a program on early movie theaters in our community.  Much of it is done with photos from the historical society and archived newspapers.  But while looking here and there I ran across a source called: Julias Cahn's Official Theatrical Guide.  

Starting in 1896 and spanning the era when "moving pictures" began to supplant vaudeville it is a treasure trove of information.  I was only looking for material on the local theaters, but in its hundreds of pages there is much more.  Lets have a look at some ads.....

Ben-Hur stables!  Of course this 1907 edition of the Official Theatrical guide is not referencing the classic 1959 movie.  That was based on an 1880 book written by Lew Wallace, Civil War general and one time governor of New Mexico Territory.  Horses for Stage Use.  Who knew?

The term "Klieg Light" for early arc lamp theater illumination was known to me.  I did not know it was marketed by the Brothers Kliegl.  So where did the L go?  Evidently the trade name was actually Klieglight with the L in the middle going with both Kliegl and Light.  An interesting company, they only went out of business in 1996, as by then everything electrical was being produced on the Cheap and in the East.

Ethel Barrymore.  Obviously part of the famous Barrymore family of actors.  Grand aunt to the fetching Drew Barrymore.  Supposedly, before he became famous, Winston Churchill proposed to her.

1907 was in the transition period where Vaudeville was in decline and Moving Pictures were ascendant.  Archie L. Shepard worked both sides of the aisle with "Moving Pictures Augmented by High Class Vaudeville".

Oh yes, the Stage Mobs.  Not something you'd need every day, but if you did.....

FIRST Robotics 2023 Report - Week Four

After a breakthrough session last Saturday a week of tweaking and shoring up.  

Monday

Moved the mast supports further apart and added external framework.

Put bearing blocks on the upper part of the "mast" and a mock up of the extendable arm.  Also our mascot.  This was for a test of the braking system for the winch.  And it worked, solving our last known engineering issue.*

Tuesday

Busy day.  Among other things a tour going through our work area.  We had 30 kids on seven or eight different tasks.  We got the extendable arm mounted and established that we would not need a braking system on it.  The grabber claw is in a useable state but we are 3D printing  nylon insets for the aluminum grabber bars and awaiting new cylinders.  The ones shown here were pulled from a scrap bin at one of our sponsors and one of them leaks.  

I am lobbying for putting the drive motors on temporarily, I understand there are coding issues to solve but the test base will remain intact for those.  We also have one more motor to mount and several systems to optimize.  I think the end of day Thursday pictures will be a good approximation of final form.   As we are right about at the half way point in the season....our design appears to work.

Thursday

Did not put drive motors on today.  Frame got several upgrades to strengthen it.  We also improved the winch spool and mounted a capable iteration of our grabber onto the frame.  I'm a big believer in real world testing, so with the robot on blocks to match wheel height we used the grabber to pick up and put down on all the necessary levels.

We made protective side panels for the robot.  We do not want our electronics getting bashed if somebody's arm twitches out of control.  As these are the temporary panels the team indulged themselves with signatures and cartoons.

Robot base sitting in the storage closet.  Saturday we put on the motors, bumpers and get a start on the electronics.  A solid piece of work.

Saturday

Quite a bit got done, and the quality of construction is solid.  Here's the drive base with drive motors and battery mounted, super structure shored up, mast now attached to winch.  The adult helping is a motor cycle enthusiast.  I had to tease him a little, asking if the robot had more black with silver studs than the gear he wears to Sturgis!

Build and software are progressing at about the same pace.  The latter seem to have debugged the drive code and have the autonomous balance routine back in operation.  The math for presetting arm locations based on rotary encoders looks interesting.

A new problem became apparent today.  The arm is rather bouncy, which will make some operations slower.  Not that you should be driving around with it extended in any case.  So various combinations of gas shocks, bungees etc were tried.  Here's one test with weight attached.

This, alas, was working against too much resistance and resulted in grumpy noises and smoke from the arm motor involved, so we will have to solve this next week.  Back at it Monday with fresh ideas and hopefully with several parts that are "stuck" in the Supply Chain somewhere.  With luck we solve the bouncing,  attach the grabber and get all the electronics on by Thursday.

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* I jinxed with the "known problem" statement.  

Grandparenting.

The youngest has quite the imagination.  When we get together things get weird.

Vindolanda 2008/2023

When year end cleaning gets out of hand all sorts of things emerge from seldom opened drawers and boxes.

This is the start of my adventures at the Roman site of Vindolanda.  At Christmas I looked at my schedule for the year ahead and decided some traveling was in order.  I'd recently run across Vindolanda and their program of accepting volunteers.  I got in touch and a week or so later got this nice letter.  Notice the date:

This is actually remarkable for three reasons.

1. They used the US sequence of month/date/year instead of UK date/month/year

2. I've now been going over to excavate for 15 years, minus a couple for Covid.

3. There was once a time when you could get in touch in early January and get an excavation slot.  Now the spots all go within seconds of their go-live time in early November!

Three months.  Three busy months before the ridiculously early Northumbrian sunrise rouses me for my first day of excavations.  Will I regret Jet Lag Drinks Hour the night before?  I doubt it.