Team MATLAB

"but s and t aren't even near each other!" - anon

Janak Agrawal, Amy Fang, Robot Saraka, Claire Traweek, Mike Wang

8

Came up with team name. Hope we're not infringing copyright.

9

Commence kitbot construction.

10

Kitbot built and driving in a square! Strategy report submitted.

11

TAMProxy is up and running. Protip: don't bother with trying to make the .hex file from source: it will fail due to mysterious missing dependencies. Instead, from mitchgu's github download one of the releases and use the teensy uploader to upload the .hex file directly.

Amy had the brilliant idea of reading through past maslab wikis, lots of insight here, especially concerning ball collection mechanisms.

Summary

things that worked

To collect balls, we strung rubber bands between two rotating cirrcular drums. This was a very good collection mechanism. We tried to make it as wide as possible, but there was the awkward problem of where to put the motor. There was some talk of gears, but in the end it just jutted out the side. We then put our IR sensors on the end of this and used those to sense things.

We found IR sensors superior to buttons or micro switches for wall bouncing -- they were smoother overall and failed less. We had four in total: two in front and two on the sides.

Our CV was pretty gr8. would reccomend blurring

things that didn't

Sometimes when we saw a goal we'd just stall out because we'd try to align ourselves and it wouldn't wor

PIDs can be super great especially while you're trying to turn to face a ball. We kept overshooting which would put us in a weird stall.

The PIDs this year was kind of poor and vaguely unusuable. We still needed something for stall detection, which lead us to...

hacky i2c

So, we found working accelerometers (thanks, 6.08!), but they communicated solely by i2c and spi. No one's gotten i2c to work for TAMproxy so far, and we added our acceleronmeters pretty late in the game, so we got a second tamProxy-less teensy that could read outputs from the accelerometer normally. We converted things to regular old digital out and read it with TAMproxy on our main Teensy.