Week 2 has been a lesson in patients for the team. 

We ordered 24 power cells right away on kick off, but due a series of events we actually didn’t get them in hand until this past Tuesday 1/14 evening, and finally got to prototype with more than 1 ball Thursday 1/16 evening.

With the lack of a full robot holding capacity of power cells, we focused on vision tracking. We would like to have a turret this year and be able to auto track the high goal. We have another series of events that happened with various software updates being required but not downloaded , extracurriculars (outside of robotics) that pulled students away, and it being finals week means we didn’t get anything going until last night. BUT, we are very excited to have vision tracking figured out and working for the 1st time in our history. We’ve used cameras in the past but never had the camera really track anything and control the robot/parts of the robot.

Things we learned in prototyping with more than 1 ball. These balls DO NOT like to touch. We’ve seen and heard about this from other teams videos and comments but seeing it first hand is something else all together. We were running power cells through our 2012 robot and shooting them at the high goal and if the balls didn’t touch each other in the tower everything worked amazingly well. However as soon as 2 balls touch each other INSTANT jam.

Our set up in 2012 only had belting/rollers on 1 side of the tower. In using the robot with this year's game piece it is clear that having belting/rollers on 2 sides to keep the balls moving and not rolling is key to not having jams.

We’ve got some intake/hopper prototypes being built and should be able to test them thoroughly Saturday. Look for another update Saturday evening.