WEEK 5: 02/09/24
After having a battery issue earlier in the week, we worked on fixing a fried SPARK MAX motor controller, a damaged NEO motor, and the wiring of the battery. We hope to implement a more meticulous process in checking the status and wiring of batteries. Many of our batteries had loose connections that were fixed last week; in the future we will be consistently classifying the status of the batteries we have.
WEEK 5: 02/10/24
We began the day by tracking the status of all of the batteries we own, and classifying them with a new system: blue→ great battery (competition), green→ good battery (drive team practice), orange→ fair battery (testing robot and sensors, running robot for short intervals) , red→ bad battery (depending on resistance, it can be used for small testing of sensors, or it is going to be recycled). Then we wired the shooter of the robot so that we can start testing code again.
There was also a sensor issue seen during drive team practice, so we tested the sensor to troubleshoot what was the problem. When looking at the connections, we saw that there was a pin that was not fully in the housing for the signal wire, which led to the sensor not functioning properly.
WEEK 5: 02/11/24
With less than a week until the Week 0 competition, we began packing materials we needed to bring. We also took the time to finally clean the electrical room after weeks of having no more table space.
WEEK 5: 02/16/24
We fixed a loose ferrule connection on the roborio, re-labeled the 2024 batteries with the new serial numbers, extended a SPARK MAX motor controller’s wires, and finalised the packing list/ tote for our Week 0 competition. A limelight camera was mounted to our robot as well, so it was wired between the Radio and the PDP. There is currently an issue with accessibility to the electrical board, but this issue should hopefully be solved by the finalised electrical board design we will print.
WEEK 5: 02/17/24
It’s our first non-official competition of the season! Though there was not a lot of electrical work done during the competition, we tried to wire the LED indication tower. The housing on the existing tower was not adaptable to the RoboRio, so we made a male to male housing pigtail. There was an issue with one battery that was taken to competition, but we have integrated a new standard in our battery testing procedure to prevent the use of fair batteries during matches. Drive team has also implemented checking battery status with a battery beak, which is further insurance of the use of good batteries during matches.
WEEK 5: 02/18/24
We started planning out the aesthetic lights for the robot→ underglow and arcade lights. There is still some more planning needed to figure out where they are going to be placed, and where power will need to be drawn. We also received 2 new batteries, so a few people worked on wiring those up. Stormgears also has signs we use in the stands that spell out 5-4-2-2-?; they are difficult to control due to issues with the microcontroller and radio components, so we started prototyping a design that could integrate 2 microcontrollers onto one board.
