28.12.11 Wednesday Meeting

I got a late-notice email notifying me that the team would be meeting on Wednesday, in the hopes that we would be able to finish our secondary (pre-season) drive train. While we were not able to complete the drive train, we did make a few team decisions, and a good bit of headway with the drive train. I am slowly easing into the team. Only a portion of the team knows me, and I haven't been a part of the team for nearly 2 years so it will take a little bit of time before I am part of the team. The little work I did do Wednesday was cleaning up a new lower end set of calipers. I disassembled the main "chassis" of the calipers and cleaned the rails and inner surfaces of the chassis in an attempt to make the calipers run more smoothly (originally they had the feel of grinding metal on metal when used). When reassembled there was definite improvement, however Mr. Reif (our head technical mentor) said he would do some more work on them at home.

New cRIO

One big change this year is the cRIO. National Instruments has released the cRIO (compact Reconfigurable Input/Output) FRCII. This new "onboard computer" is smaller with only 4 expansion slots (as opposed to the previous iteration's 8) for plugging in NI (National Instruments) I/O modules. The RAM has been doubled, as well as program storage. On the new cRIO FRCII expansion slots are also assigned: slot 1 is analog I/O, slot 2 is digital I/O, and slot three is solenoid control (slot 4 is multi-purpose). My understanding is that programming will not undergo any radical changes, if any. However the 2012 cRIO imaging tool, used to configure the cRIO for competition et cetera, is almost a completely different program. The tool includes a GUI with an image of whatever cRIO the program is currently interfaced with showing installed modules, as well as a virtual version of the DIP switches that were physically on board the old iteration for use in operations such as IP reset.

The updated FRC cRIO can be seen above with and without I/O modules installed. Other discrepancies between these and the previous version are the reduction from 2 to 1 Ethernet port, and the reduction of minimum voltage from 19v to 9v (allowing it to now be driven off of a standard FRC bot circuit without converting it up to 24v).

With the team not meeting during the holiday break, I am simply waiting for Kickoff (January 7th, the beginning of the season). While I will periodically post information such as this post, gleaned from research regarding the season to come, chances are I will not have sufficient material for a post every day.

RIght down to business

After arriving home from Germany late Wednesday night, I had the opportunity to jump right into Circuit Breaker action first participating in an annual poetry reading event on Friday, and over the weekend fabricating two identical spacers to be used with 8" Omniwheels in the drive train of this years secondary robot. While the process went relatively smoothly, it was not altogether straightforward (in that I was doing things I had never done before). I started by chopping a plate of aluminum down for the two pieces needed, then using a rotary table (a tool I have never used before), I milled an outside circumference. From there I punched six holes, which the rotary table made incredibly easy due to the fact that it is equipped with exact angle measurements so all I needed to do was drill a whole, and turn the piece 60 degrees; drill another whole, turn it another 60 degrees. Lather, rinse, repeat. From there I drilled and bored out the inner diameter on a lathe. All this happened at the Design Massif machine shop in conjunction with Adam Reif, a mentor on the team.

Gettin' Started Late

My name is Avery Hughes, and I am just now joining the Circuit Breakers, FRC Team 3189. In order to receive academic credit for my work on the Robotics Team I am required to keep an Engineer's Log recording my trails, tribulations, and learning from the FRC season; I have decided to keep this log solely as a blog. The team has been meeting since school began this year, however as I recently returned from a non-academic semester in Europe I was not able to be a part of the team until now. I competed in FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) in 2010 with 3189 (the team's rookie year), and in 2011 with another rookie team at a school I attended that year in the Sacramento Area. It is rather late to join the team as the official "Build Period" begins January 7 with the unveiling of this years "game" (a competition in which a robot the team builds must participate) and rules. Despite the tardy nature of my arrival on the FRC scene this year, I feel I will be able to comfortably ease myself in with the team (many constituents of which I already know rather well) and throw in my two cents when it comes time to build a bot.

If you have read through this entire post, I will present to you a heartfelt apology for the current quality and strange aspects of my writing. As I mentioned previously, I have very recently (less than a week ago) returned from an extended stay in Europe and, while I do not have extensive skills in other languages, my English is still taking it's time returning to me and seems, in its own way, rather foreign.