Blog

Spent a while working out the algorithm and math for our climber. Since we're using a potentiometer in a linear fasion, it creates a Sin wave, so we had to work with that when writing the code. Here's us solving it for the frequency given the location of the separate arms, and the time each arm is taking to move.

Today, after we finished some of our camera tracking stuff, we programmers had some free time. Since it is imperative that the climber we decided to use(the toothed "hedge-trimmer") has both motors run at exactly the same speed, give or take, we decided to start working on the code for it. The only problem is, as with anything, the programming cannot be tested until the hardware is complete. So, we decided to mock up the potentiometer system that we'll be using to drive the climber, in order to complete the algorithm by the time the device is ready. Here's what it looks like(our mock-up, not the actual thing), the two motor represent the motors driving the separate sides of the climber, and the potentiometers are mounted to them by a coat-hanger that we decimated. Our goal is to make the plastic strips attached to the potentiomenters wave back and forth together.

We got the code working for Arick's climber design, here's a video of us demonstrating it on an electrical board.

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Andrew S.

As you may well guess, we programmers have a bit of time on our hands while we wait for the new robot to be at a programmable point, so we have been working on our to-do list. Tonight we did the following:

• Figured out the SmartDashboard's new LiveWindow
• Tested the functionality of the auto code generator from WPI
• Timed the CANbus to make an educated decision about 2CAN vs. CANbus vs. PWM cables
• Started to load C++ on an extra CRio to see if it works better than Java

That seems about it for today. In addition to that we used some of our time yesterday to make a few more CAN to Serial cables; ours were not always working properly...

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Andrew S.