Day 27: More Power + Collection Testing

We received our 4 MiniCIMs from West Coast Products today. VexPro was out of stock but R.C. over at WCP was able to get us what we needed. They also have great calculators on their resources page to help you figure out belt and gear spacing or calculate your drive trains final speed.

We mounted the 4 MiniCIMs and added 4 talons to our practice bot so we now have 8 motors on our drive train. We didn't do much driving, but from the little testing we did the acceleration is much nicer now and feels a lot more like our 6 CIM drive from last season.

Our collector testing is still underway; we found some bugs last night that needed to be corrected and we worked on that for most of the day. Here are some clips from tonight's tests. We still don't have all the variables right but it's collecting much better now.

We found a problem with our pneumatic wheel switching at the end of the meeting. For some reason the modules aren't keeping themselves off the ground like they should be in traction mode. We're using 4 1.0625" bore pneumatic cylinders at 60psi, that should be enough to hold up to about 200lbs but that math doesn't seem to be fitting reality. It probably means we didn't account for something in our math. We'll investigate more tomorrow.

Parts were dropped off at Royalty Metal to be powder coated and should be back sometime next week.

We have also been working on getting an IMU setup to give us orientation of robot at all times. We had the first successful serial transfer today of quality orientation data. The IMU has 9 axis of measurement so it is able to reduce the amount of error that you would see from just using a standard gyro.

- Spectrum

“It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true." - Mark Twain