Worksession Recap: 02/15

5 days until Stop Build!

We are in the final stretch, with only five days left until we cannot touch the robot! This weekend and the first days of break, we will be working extra hard to complete the robot that we will ship to our first competition in Texas.

Design

Climber

The gearbox has been done for about a week now, but here’s a first look at the gearbox winch system we have this year. Hopefully in two days this will be a physical photo of the assembly.

Dolly

Review of first draft of dolly. Changes to be implemented soon.

Forklift

Finished basic features of tower in CAM

Machining/Assembly

Finished machining our robot’s linear lift! Started assembling it onto the robot. Tested a new method for making the contact between sliders and rails smooth (milling the curve vs. trying to break it in), works on test piece but need improvements to Z accuracy for the final cut.

Painting

Painting continues. Couple of brackets and collector frame + Comp bot lift diagonal bars finished painting black.

Electrical

Today, we completed an initial wiring setup of the core electrical components and the drivetrain speed controllers. After resolving some placement issues and silly mistakes, we were able to load software onto the robot and run the drivetrain. Once we get a battery mount installed, we will work on tuning the drivetrain control loops for improved accuracy.

Software

Drivetrain Setup (Shadaj)

After the drivetrain was wired up, we updated our software to control it. At first, we ran into roadblocks with our Scala Native software libraries missing support for the Victor SPX speed controllers (new for this year). After a few minutes of work, however, we were able to complete support for these speed controllers and deploy software to the robot, which was able to successfully control the drivetrain.

Scalafmt and Scalafix (Shadaj)

As our software base becomes more complex and many new developers join the team, maintaining a clean code base that has a uniform formatting is a much larger challenge. In the past, we would include formatting issues in pull request reviews, which was a very slow and painful process. Now, I have set up the scalafmt and scalafix tools which automatically clean up our code so we can focus on robot logic instead.