Team Three/Journal
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== Day 15: Mon, Jan 20th == | == Day 15: Mon, Jan 20th == | ||
| − | + | During the day, we continued to CAD, getting ready to laser-cut a more finalized body tomorrow. | |
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| + | For dinner, the team went out to Chinatown for a member's birthday - thanks guys! :) | ||
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| + | After getting back, we - you guessed it - continued CADing at night. On a positive note, the member with pinkeye seems to have recovered! | ||
== Day 16: Tues, Jan 21st == | == Day 16: Tues, Jan 21st == | ||
Revision as of 18:35, 23 January 2014
Day 1: Mon, Jan 6th
Team Roles: MechE - Vincent, Kath, Melody
Coding - Angel, Matt
For our first day, we built the Kit Bot out of the parts given in the lab so that our coders could begin playing with the software.
Our team started meeting over winter break to get a head start because most of us have other IAP obligations (mainly, UPOP and UROPs). We started bandying ideas around after looking through past wiki's, and CADed half of the robot. We ordered some supplies over break (and asked Ariel a lot of questions), but are still missing some.
Currently, we plan to finish CADing today. We also need to get MDF for the body of our robot ASAP, once we find a way to get to Home Depot...
Day 2: Tues, Jan 7th
When working on getting the Kit Bot to move today, we discovered that the set screw in the Kit Bot's hub was loosened. Unfortunately, the wiring was reversed so the bot drove the other way from intended.
Unfortunately, we haven't yet finished CADing our robot, but we're hoping to be able to start prototyping parts tomorrow if supplies come in :) (Namely, the rubber band roller, ramp, and anything else we have time for.)
Melody and Kath attended the SolidWorks tutorial, while Vincent got trained in laser cutting. We've signed up to get further shop and laser cutter-trained tomorrow.
Later in the night, we got the color sensor to work with the Arduino. However, we ran into problems using the Maple for the color sensor since the method pulseIn was implemented for the Arudino, but not the Maple.
In the meanwhile, the tablet got flung a couple of times since there were issues with the motor controller...
Day 3: Wed, Jan 8th
Now that both Melody and Kath finished their 2.670 shop training course, the whole team could attend the morning's lectures on the physics of the robot and PID.
Angel continued working on getting the Kit Bot to be fully functional - we replaced the faulty motor controller and things worked out a lot better.
Melody and Kath got shop and laser-cutter trained at the IDC (thanks to Charles!) so that we can finally start cutting things down to the right sizes we want.
We prototyped a conveyor belt mechanism to transport the balls up, but without extra parts that we didn't want to deal with, we realized that it wouldn't be strong enough to hold up the balls. Therefore, we decided to make a screw after all, which we had initially ruled out - over the weekend, perhaps?
On the bright side, we laser-cut the parts needed for the rubber band roller and turned a rod down to the right size to start prototyping the rubber band roller tomorrow.
Our Kit Bot can now successfully distinguish between whether a ball is red or green and start to drive towards it!
Day 4: Thurs, Jan 9th
On the software side, we worked on tracking the ball better and getting the gyro to work, as well as edge detection of the walls.
In other news, we got the rubber band roller to work! We had to make a few simple modifications to our original design in order for the ball to never get stuck, but it seems to work great now. (knock on wood)
We've also spent a good chunk of the day creating drawings getting ready to do a next round of laser cutting and mechanism prototyping. Because the lab isn't stocked with angle brackets, we made our own.
We laser cut our hopper up top. Like our rubber band roller, we had to make a few simple modifications to our original design to prevent the balls from being stuck.
Day 5: Fri, Jan 10th
Almost the end of the first week! We worked on prototyping a screw, and plan to finish prototyping our claw by the end of today. To that end, we worked on making the relevant part of the energy silo so that we could actually test it while the organizers start making the rest of the field pieces.
Day 6: Sat, Jan 11th
Lab wasn't open today, but we planed ahead and brought back a bunch of material to our dorm to keep working in the evening in our awesome Maker Space. During the day, we bought extra supplies from Home Depot (such as MDF, sandpaper) thanks to a ride from a friend. We added supports to our Archimedes screw.
Day 7: Sun, Jan 12th
The MASLAB organizers opened the lab today at 2PM (thank you!), so we went in to keep tweaking our mechanism prototypes. Sadly, we ran into a lot of problems with our screw in the afternoon/evening. Whenever we fixed one problem, another cropped up, leaving us no choice but to resort to lots and lots of duct tape and even more bandsawing. Finally, we got our prototype to work (with the ball exiting on the correct side), so we finished up the night by CADing in our changes to laser cut tomorrow.
In addition, we improved our claw by changing a couple of things from our first very rough iteration.
We left lab a bit earlier than usual today because three of our five team members (all of them MechE) have UPOP from 9-5PM tomorrow. However, the coders will still be in lab tomorrow, and the MechE's will join as soon as possible!
Ideally, we will be able to finish prototyping all of our mechanisms either tomorrow or Tuesday, so that we can start building our robot to finish a first iteration by the end of this week. Ambitious, perhaps, but it's better to set higher goals and not reach them than to not set goals at all.
Day 8: Mon, Jan 13th
At first, we tried to write our own Firmware and got some of it working, but then we decided to try using their libraries again. We didn't get Firmware working until really late today (around 5AM...), but then we worked on writing some of the code for the in-lab Olypmics checkoffs.
We made a holder for the ultrasonic, and finalized the CAD for the rubber band roller. We laser-cutted the screw changes we made yesterday (flap) and verified that it worked.
Day 9: Tues, Jan 14th
On the coding side, we got four out of the five Olympics checkoffs: moving five feet forward, orienting towards green and red balls, moving in a square, and stopping one foot from a wall!
We started on testing the ramp, but decided to finish tomorrow and wire the rubber band roller to run.
We're still working on finishing the CADing of the robot, taking into account all of the changes that we have made to the mechanisms.
Day 10: Wed, Jan 15th
In a familiar theme, we're still working on CADing our robot. Our plan is to be able to basically build our final robot once we're done with the CAD because we've already prototyped all the mechanisms. The only one that needs a lot more work than others is the energy silo.
On the software side, we continued to try coding wall-following, but are having issues, particularly with the ultrasonic sensors. They keep on disconnecting or failing to update so it is almost impossible to test our wall following algorithm or use the sensors at all.
Day 11: Thurs, Jan 16th
Second to last day of UPOP! Because the mock competition is tomorrow, we worked really hard to try and finish as much of the first two layers as possible (to at least be able to collect balls). We got to finalizing the CAD for the first two layers for our first full robot prototype and laser-cutting the parts out. However, when we started assembling in real life and not in SolidWorks, we noticed a few errors - i.e. the holes in the angle brackets weren't necessarily the same distance apart from the corner!
These were quickly fixed, but there wasn't enough time to finish wiring all of the electronics before it was way too late since we had to get up at 8AM tomorrow again...
Day 12: Fri, Jan 17th
LAST DAY OF UPOP!!! Sadly, we didn't end up being able to finish getting a driving robot by the time the mock competition ended today. We finished UPOP early today and got to the IDC at around 3:30 or so. Even though we immediately started work on getting the rubber band roller assembled onto our ProtoBot, it took a bit longer than expected because of having to turn down the rod, etc. Instead of our original method of double-hubbing the motor to the rod, we followed Alex's advice and just used a lathe to drill a hole in the rod face-on, and then on the side with the drill press to make a threaded hole for a set screw.
Looking back, UPOP really took a lot out of our team this week. Three of us (Melody, Kath, and Vincent) did UPOP - aka the whole MechE part of the team. Our progress slowed considerably starting on Monday because UPOP was from 9AM-5PM everyday. This meant that we were exhausted by the time we returned to the lab shortly after dinner. The continual cycle of having to wake up early, actively participate in UPOP during the day, and stay late for MASLAB took its toll. We had tried to help mitigate this a bit by starting over winter break, but we're still not exactly where we want to be at this point in the competition.
Coding-wise, one of our two coders got pink eye and the other couldn't code in the interim that we took apart KitBot and were working on ProtoBot. The ultrasonic sensors are proving to be quite troublesome as they randomly output bad data or seem to make the Maple crash. We think around 50 man hours were wasted debugging the ultrasonics. Furthermore, at around 5AM, the Maple died so no code testing will be able to be done until we get a new one on Sunday. We did however, figure out how to use the relay, which will save us one motor controller as one of our motors does not need speed or direction control. We also started to tame the rat's nest of wires overpowering our robot.
Day 13: Sat, Jan 18th
Continuing a trend, lab wasn't open on Sat (today) so we brought back material to make a screw. (Last Saturday, we only made a prototype screw half the height of the actual one.) We measured out the length of wire, bent it, set the correct spacing, and added supports. The adhesive smelled extremely bad, as usual...but we finished!
Unfortunately, THE MAPLE BURNT OUT early Saturday morning (or late Friday night), so no progress on the coding side got done.
Day 14: Sun, Jan 19th
Lab opened at 3PM today, so we came in and started laser-cutting the supporting parts of our screw once we clarified some dimensions in the CAD. Since the lab ran out of Maple's, minimal progress on the code was made. We attempted to write our own code to test wall following using an Arduino Uno, but various issues such as the Uno only having 2 interrupt pins prevented us from making much progress. We tested out infrared sensors as potential alternatives to the ultrasonics, which kept giving garbage data or crashing the Maple randomly.
However, the ranges provided by the infrared were not what we needed, as we need to be able to measure distances accurately within a foot. We found out that the ultrasonic sensors that we had should not be powered through all the pins at once. According to the datasheet, we were to connect the ground before the power, which completely befuddled us. We decided that we would use a relay to provide power after the ground was connected. Then, we sent an email to all of the MASLAB teams asking to borrow a Maple from anyone who had an extra.
Fortunately, Team 13 (shout-out to Felix!!!) lent us one, earning our eternal gratitude. A few other people also responded offering to help, for which we are extremely grateful. Thanks for showing that MIT isn't cut-throat, even in intense competitions like MASLAB! :)
Day 15: Mon, Jan 20th
During the day, we continued to CAD, getting ready to laser-cut a more finalized body tomorrow.
For dinner, the team went out to Chinatown for a member's birthday - thanks guys! :)
After getting back, we - you guessed it - continued CADing at night. On a positive note, the member with pinkeye seems to have recovered!
Day 16: Tues, Jan 21st
Today, we almost finished all the electrical wiring and soldering so that the coders could start trying to drive the robot tomorrow and test their hundreds of lines of untested code.
We also worked more on our top layer - so close to being able to laser-cut it out!
After much deliberation, we've decided not to go for the energy silo and instead use the space on the second layer for a low-scoring mechanism. At the start of MASLAB, we thought the energy silo was a red herring but decided to try and design something anyway. Although it kinda worked, we think that being able to score both high and low in the reactors is a bigger priority right now.
Day 17: Wed, Jan 22nd
The coders were able to start driving the robot late today, hooray! Unfortunately, after days and days of trying to get the ultrasonics to work, we've given up on their reliability...
On the MechE side, we built another Archimedes screw (pretty much our final one, will be used in Mock 2 on Friday) and got half of the low-scoring mechanism done. After laser-cutting the top layer, we realized that we had made a huge mistake - we couldn't actually assemble the top layer onto our robot because it was supposed to fit under two tabs that stuck out of our screw side walls (which looked fine in the CAD, but not okay in real life).
For now, we just dremeled the space out enough that it can fit under, and use the angle brackets to support the layer, as originally planned.
We have a lot to do tomorrow to get ready for the second mock competition!
