End of the year

      Today is an unusual meeting. We are meeting on Friday to make major changes to the bot. We are makng towers tothe bot to catch the new arms to pick up crates. The bot can now pick up crates at new angles. "Jiggles" no has a platform on the scissor lift to stablize the crates on the back of the bot. The New parts should help the bot do better in the next competition.

         We are excited for the San diego competition and using the new devises

Our bot had a major surgery

Add caption

Today we are reparing the the bot and adding new parts and autonomies. currently has no front, and no conveyor belt. We now will add a second arm to the bot and are making new programs for them. The bot needs a working arm to pick up crates. Also the conveyor belt is narrower and the bot will look different at the San Diego compitition.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Today we are prototyping new designs for picking up crates. We are starting to make a capacity for our bot to score magnet balls. We are prototyping new ways to move magnet balls to the goal. Phi Omega has made a new idea to move the bowling ball too.

More prototyping

Last week, during our post-competition discussion, we made a list of problems we'd encountered during competition so that we could work on solving them.  During the competition, our left front motor had failed, and something was also wrong with the servo on the crate-grabbing mechanism.  Also, sometimes balls from the conveyor didn't make it into the crates on the scissor lift.
We wanted to fix the left front motor and servo on the crate grabber, make the ball chute less steep (so balls from the conveyor actually make it into the crates), and make a new or modified crate-grabbing mechanism.  We easily fixed the left front motor by adding some spacers, and today we fixed the servo as well.

Since we have a few weeks until the next competition, we're concentrating on prototyping the new mechanisms for grabbing crates.  We have several designs, including a slight modification of our current "tomahawk," two different types of mechanisms for squeezing crates, and a little pincher that goes on the back of the scissor lift to get crates that way.

We hope to finish our major modifications to the robot in the next few weeks, so that we can concentrate on driver practice.  We'll also need to work on some more autonomies before San Diego.

Dec. 15

Dec. 15

Last saturday we had our first competition of the year. We were able to get into the finals with team 5011, or Botsquad from SOAR High School. In the semi finals our alliance placed fourth. We lost because of the failure to tighten our axel locks and we lost the ability to use our left motors. Phi-Omega's robot "Jiggles"? has had problems with encoder motors burning out. Our lesson from the competition are that we need to bring more assembled encoder motors, tighten gears after Every match, and get more driver training. The team is working on new autonomies and new ways to pick up crates.

Scissor Lift

Busy meeting

Today we had visitors: the Lionotics team from Eastside High School.  They're a rookie team, and they brought their kit of parts, which they hadn't unpacked yet!  So we went through the kit with them and gave them an introduction to the building process.  We hope that they'll do well this season!

We're still planning to have the scrimmage this weekend, in Joe Walker Middle School's multi-use building, from 8 am to 1:30 pm.  We'll probably have seven teams there, and we hope to run practice matches and have build time.  Hopefully, our robot (and PHI Alpha's) will be at least somewhat improved since the last scrimmage.  I'm excited to see what other teams are working on, too!

Right now, we're working on a way to deliver racquetballs from the conveyor belt to a basket on the scissor lift. We're also finishing re-mounting the arm, and we have some other things to work on as well.

Getting ready for the next scrimmage

Our robot has been taken apart and put (mostly) back together yet again.  This past weekend, one of our mentors took home the robot and started measuring things... which led to taking a few things off... and to make a long story short, the robot came back different today than it was the last time we saw it.

Today, our first task was to figure out what to do with the conveyor belt.  Before today, the conveyor belt was slanted, but it held too many racquetballs.  Our solution for this was to mount it vertically, which would make its ball capacity smaller and give us more room to add other mechanisms (a magnet ball delivery system, for example.)  We also need to remount the arm.

We're trying to get all these things finished before the November 19th scrimmage, which we'll be hosting.  We'll be inviting around six other teams from our area, and we plan to run practice matches as well as have free building time.  Hopefully, all the teams that come will be able to have a productive build day and practice tournament.

After the scrimmage

Today, we talked about what we thought of the scrimmage on Saturday, since this was the first meeting since the scrimmage.  In my opinion, we had a lot of fun, and we also made a lot of progress and were able to help other teams.

The scrimmage went much better than I expected.  The night before, Tyler took apart the robot, then put it back together and made it work better than before, so we were actually able to drive in the first match of the scrimmage.  During the course of the day, we made the back wheels chain-driven, mounted the scissor lift, and competed in several matches.  Our new members actually got to drive, and they did really well, considering they had no driver practice!  All in all, it was quite a productive Saturday.

Today, we also found out that we (not Garagebots, as we'd previously thought) will be planning the November 19th scrimmage.  Before then, we need to make several hardware and software changes: make the robot legal, write some autonomies, and make the conveyor belt straight.  Right now, our robot is almost 19" long- about an inch out of our required dimensions.  Our conveyor belt also holds more than 15 balls, so that's another problem we need to fix.

We're also starting driver practice today, and it seems like we need to work on our strategy, because two minutes and thirty seconds is hardly enough time to do anything.  We'll probably need to experiment with what gets us more points (bowling ball vs. crates, for example), but we also need to get faster at driving and picking up crates.  Right now, we can barely grab, fill, and lift a crate in the minute and thirty seconds before End Game.  Hopefully, we can improve with more driver practice.

Last meeting before the scrimmage

For almost the whole meeting, we worked on wiring the robot and trying to get it to move correctly in teleop.  It took quite a while to mount the motor controllers, then when we ran the teleop program, nothing seemed to work right.  We finally fixed the problem (I think), but our robot is still not functional.  We can't run the conveyor belt, because it's twisted to one side, and we also haven't mounted the scissor lift yet.

Fortunately, Saturday is a scrimmage (not a real tournament) because we plan to do some building once we get there!  We'll probably also need to work on software.  In addition to mounting the scissor lift and making the conveyor straight, it would be nice if we could make the back wheels chain-driven and write some simple autonomies.  However, we probably won't get that far.  The most valuable part of the scrimmage, in my opinion, is being able to see other teams' ideas, getting a feel for the game and strategy, and being able to connect with other teams.  Even if our robot doesn't work well, we can certainly get a lot out of the scrimmage.

Rewiring and rebuilding

Last night, we realized that we had a two-wheel drive chassis instead of a four-wheel drive!  So we had to add two motors to our drive train, which was sort of difficult since the scissor lift was in the way.  We ended up raising the scissor lift, which created another problem: a crate on top of the scissor lift would be too high for us to deliver racquetballs to it via the conveyor belt.  We are still working on this!

While all this was going on, we also mounted the front arm so we'd be able to pick up crates.  This was one of the tasks we'd been trying to do for a few meetings, so at least we made some progress.

We also had to write a teleop program so we'd be able to drive the robot on Saturday.  This was done, but we can't test the program until the robot is actually wired.  As you can see, there are quite a few things we need to finish or fix before we have a working robot- even one that can just drive!  Hopefully, we can make a lot of progress on Thursday.

Adding motors to drive train

Still working on drive train

Adding front crate-grabbing arm

Our robot in progress

Scrambling to get ready for scrimmage

We've been trying to get our robot together so we can compete in a scrimmage next Saturday, but we still have a ways to go.  Last night, we had several projects going on, but the really essential ones didn't get done. We really needed our crate-grabbing arm mounted, but it didn't get done (we've been trying to get it done for about a week) and we hope to finish that task Monday.  We don't want to go to the scrimmage with a robot that just picks up racquetballs and spits them out the other end!

PHI Alpha added the tread gears to our front-facing conveyor belt, making it functional, and they also mounted it to their robot.  It worked really well.  Since there's a rule that we can only be able to hold 15 racquetballs at a time, this conveyor is great because it's so small.  It picks balls up quickly, too, so once we get the tread gears we ordered, PHI Omega may add it to our robot, too!  (See previous post for a picture of the front-facing conveyor.)

We also worked on the scissor lift quite a bit, and at the end of the meeting, it was able to raise two crates- one sitting on top of a platform and one attached by little hooks.  (See previous post for pictures.)  The scissor lift isn't mounted, though, and I hear it still needs some work.  A teleop program so we can drive the robot is also on our list of things we really need for the scrimmage.  Of course, we'd love to have some autonomous programs, too, but that's a little ambitious....

The scissor lift raises a crate and Tyler measures the height of the crate to determine its point value

Our robot with the front conveyor belt mounted

The scissor lift raises two crates, the red one on the platform and the blue one attached to hooks

The scissor lift raises another crate

Working on the scissor lift

Front-facing conveyor belt mounted to PHI Alpha's robot

"Jiggles's Revenge"

Today we have been mounting the many new devices to "Jiggles". These include a conveyor belt, an arm, and a scissor lift. Also"Jiggles"is getting his revenge for my last post by having caused massive frustration with 18.5" wheel base. He has also drawn some blood from Tyler and me.

Our conveyor belt

Crate-grabbing mechanism last week

Making progress

Today we continued to work on our scissor lift and front conveyor belt prototypes.  The scissor lift works pretty well (it's able to lift crates) and has the added "cool factor" as opposed to a plain arm.  We're still working to improve the design, though.

We also replaced the rubber bands on the front-facing conveyor belt with treads, which work a lot better; however, we're not able to test the prototype until we can get our hands on some more tread gears.  (Alpha is using them for their conveyor belt right now.)  Still, we determined that the conveyor belt should be able to pick up racquetballs off the floor, although it would need to be angled slightly.

One other thing we did was continue mounting the standard conveyor belt on the front of the squarebot.  We hope to have it done soon!

Lots to do

We have two scrimmages that may be in our near future: the October 29th scrimmage and the possible November 19th scrimmage.  The October scrimmage is in Monrovia and will be hosted by Team 25, the Rock and Roll Robots.  However, we're not completely sure if we will go; our robot still needs a lot of work, and it's only two weeks away.

The other scrimmage, which would be hosted by us, is still theoretical.  We have a probable location, and since there are eight teams (including both PHI teams) in the area, we probably have enough teams to have an event.  We still need to determine whether we have enough people to run the event, though, before we can invite teams.

Work on the squarebot "Jiggles" continued today, including rewiring and making a wiring diagram for the robot.  We also partially mounted the conveyor belt on the front of the robot, although it still needs to be secured, and the bottom needs to be cut in a straight line.  Our front-facing conveyor prototype still needs some work, because the rubber bands (which we're using instead of an actual belt) pop off as the wheels turn.  Still, we're getting closer to a working robot.

I am angry at "Jiggles"

We had to rewire "Jiggles" and change its programming to match.  After 8 tries, we got all our wheels rolling.
Note: "Jiggles" is the squarebot mentioned in the previous post.

Still working on several designs

We had several projects that we were working on during this meeting, most of them continued from Monday's meeting.  This included both software and hardware projects.

Two of our new team members worked on rewiring and writing a teleop program for the squarebot chassis, which they've been working on for a few weeks.  Currently, the squarebot has nothing mounted on it, but we hope to add some of our mechanisms to the it soon.  The squarebot is designed so we have a space to mount the conveyor belt on the front and something else on the back.

We also continued Monday's projects, the tomahawk and conveyor belt.  We motorized the tomahawk, so now it can not only grab the crate, but also rotate it, the purpose being to keep the crates level as we lift them.  Surprisingly, a servo is strong enough to rotate an empty crate; we still need to test how many balls the crate can have in it and still be rotated.  Our next plan for the tomahawk is to attach it to a rotating arm on the robot.  We also made the conveyor belt the right size to pick up racquetballs, although it still needs to be motorized.  We plan to do this on Monday.

One other thing we worked on was the scissor lift.  We had already built a scissor lift, which we planned to use to lift and stack crates, but it got taken apart.  This meeting, the mentors built a scissor lift out of cardboard, and one of our team members was also building a new metal scissor lift.

Tomahawk and conveyor

Today we mainly worked on prototyping ideas for picking up balls and crates, but we also brainstormed some ideas of how to deliver magnet balls to the off-field goals.

One of our prototypes, nicknamed the "tomahawk," was thought up by our mentor Mr. Pahle.  It consists of a fixed plastic plate, along with a plastic plate that opens and closes to grab a crate.  We programmed the tomahawk to open and close, then tested the prototype.  We discovered that it can actually lift a crate, and now we're working on attaching it to a motor and an arm.  That way, we would be able to grab a crate and lift it, keeping it level all the time.

We also worked on rebuilding a conveyor belt from two years ago, which we could use to pick up racquetballs. Of course, we are only allowed to hold fifteen balls at a time, so our conveyor belt might be too big at this point.  We were also considering mounting a magnet sensor on the conveyor belt and using the sensor to control a flap.  The flap would control the racquetballs, sending the magnet balls into a special container and the regular balls into a different area of the robot.

Looking forward to this year

We're excited to start our season with the new FTC game, Bowled Over!  Take a look at the game video here.  This year, PHI Robotics has four new members, and it's going to be fun to see what they bring to the team.

So far, we have most of the field built, including the ramps, crates, and racquetballs.  We're experimenting with the standard and tread-based chassis to determine which one would be best for us.  We also have many ball and crate pick-up ideas, including a conveyor belt, scoop, and claw, which we're still working on prototyping.

We look forward to a great year!