We're in the last stages of getting ready for our first event, which means we spent the last two meetings tuning in autonomous routines, driver practice, and getting all of our documentation and display items together for our Nov 19 event.
Three items of note during these meetings:
1. We completely replaced our intake foam and rubber bands. They were still performing, but were degrading, and we want to ensure no intake issues.
2. 11 is not equal to 10 ... OOPS!!! Somehow we missed that the max number of motors allowed on the robot was 10 - we had 11. Fortunately we have plenty "under the hood" on our lift joint (see our critical design testing/iterations (and video) in this post: http://robobraves.blogspot.com/2011/08/iterating-optimizing-dog-days-aug-9-12.html . All we needed to do was remove one motor from the lift (reducing from 4 to 3). The three motor lift with latex tubing spring assist is still plenty of oomph - all we needed after motor removal was a slight bit of autonomous routine testing.
3. We shot video of our autonomous routines. While we'd like to add sensor to improve reliability, we've run out of time for that right now and we're pretty good at managing beginning battery voltage and robot placement, Here's a quick look at our four routines:
http://www.youtube.com/uprobotics#p/u/2/MrAwPYNtpX0
Generally, we're pretty excited about things with only one more meeting - on 11/18, which will be used as a team celebration and pack up - before the event on the 19th. See you on the field!!!
