1/9 - We scheme unto the night.

Discobots and their mentors stayed at Carnegie Vanguard after school until 9PM! We would have stayed later, but the staff needed to close the school. Apparently, we're a liability.Who knew :P This was our first meeting with our new mentors from Bechtel who will devote every Monday and Friday for the rest of the FRC season.

Design: During the meeting we debated over various functions of the robot. They have up till the end of next meeting to finalize the robot's design drivers.  The kinks can be worked out later, but we will have our final design ideas by then.

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Prototyping: Further lift work on our practice robot- screwed a frame together to stabilize the REV rails. Still have yet to test it! There's also rollers put together last meeting that should fit perfectly on the rails.

before

after

rollers for the rail

Electrical: Worked on the roboRIO electronics test board, adding connectors to two batteries. It now functions! :D Bought all the parts we foresee using for this season from Houston's Electronic Parts Outlet.

Programming: We wrote some test code to get current and accelerometer data. We used the roboRio (powered by a power adapter from our mentor Phil) to test the on board accelerometer. Conclusions: Its nifty, except for the gravity. Without a three axis gyroscope, the accelerometer includes acceleration due to gravity which does leave room for inaccuracy. It's too bad a gyroscope wasn't integrated, but this just leaves more work for us. We plan on accumulating the acceleration to find velocity. Hopefully we can get an accurate velocity with this system, further testing will come soon. We also pushed some basic prototyping code for the new electronics test boards that allows us to control motor speeds.

[as a side note, Nolan doesn't know what gravity is]
[Nolan here, we need to turn off gravity. only programmers will understand my problems]