Not much has been happening with website over the past month or so, but we’re still alive, I guess. Unlike the other groups, it is difficult to just do a Website group session during the team meetings. The school blocks several of the sites that we need to use, and there are quite a few programs that we are not allowed to download onto school computers. So during the meetings, the three of us on website have been breaking off to explore other areas of the team (I don’t know where Michael and Elisha go during this time, but I head down to the Team Room to work with D&E). I guess this is good, because website isn’t really a full-time group, like Build and Imagery and everyone else is. It’s REALLY hard to just be on website, and do nothing else.

While nothing is going on at the meetings, I’ve been exploring the blog software,  and a lot has been happening on the forums. Our blog software is out of date, and I’m working on figuring out how to update it. I looked over the download page and…it made no sense. I wasn’t the one to instal the blog. I don’t know where all those fun files are. I’ve been trying to make sense of it, and I THINK that some of it finally clicking in my head. I think. I’ll continue to work on this, but I have no guarantee on when I’ll finally understand how to update it.

The forums, the forums, the forums! Activity has been high lately, but unfortunately, a lot of the posts are being made in the “…Other than Robotics” forum. There have been some good discussions about languages (Non posso parlare Italiano molto bene… ]: ) and other topics, but those really aren’t the types of posts we’re going to be looking for, come build season. Nevertheless, there has been some discussion in other areas of the forums, especially in Controls and Design.

Everyone has been really good about appropriate forum content, too! I’ve only had to warn a few people for inappropriate discussions/content, which has been great. I didn’t even have to argue about anything with anyone, which was even better.

If anyone has questions on what is appropriate and what is not, check out http://forums.gpgearheads.org/viewtopic.php?t=2306 , and if it’s not answered there, you can PM me.

If you don’t have a forums account yet, you need to make one! Though why you wouldn’t have an account, but still be reading this, is beyond me. http://forums.gpgearheads.org . Create an account. I’ll send you an email asking for your name, school, grade, and account name. When you respond, I’ll check it against the roster (to make sure you’re not some crazy old person from Antarctica who’s out to stalk and kill us all), and once I can confirm that you’re a student, I’ll activate your account so that you can post.

As Mallory already said, the FLL teams are going to be attending their competition this weekend. As one of the coaches for the teams at Ferry, I’ve been amazed at what these kids have accomplished. Both of these elementary teams did very well in robot performance at the practice tournament that was held yesterday. And I was also very amazed when Zero Gravity named their robot “Billfred” after I suggested it (it WAS Zero, right?). I don’t think that they know that Billfred is a real person…(for that matter, do the Gearhead students know who Billfred is? If you don’t, you obviously haven’t spent nearly enough time on ChiefDelphi). Anyways, good luck to all of the teams this weekend!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said it, but you all need to check out the ChiefDelphi forums. They’re a very good resource for specs on specific parts, you can see what other teams are doing, you can see examples of what works, and what doesn’t, and you’ll begin to mesh into the FIRST community, recognizing faces, names, teams, and reputations, which will be very valuable to you in the long run (Especially when we build an amazing robot this year and make it to the Championships…you’ll probably regret it when you don’t know about the people and teams who will be there!)

And finally, THANK YOU to Mr. C and Josh, who have been informing me/taking care of problems that I’m not able to get to in time. My family has shown a sudden, unexpected need for the computer in the evenings, and I haven’t been able to moderate the discussion that has been going on in that time period (and…that’s when all the discussions occur) .There HAVE been a few inappropriate posts and profile things (signatures, locations, occupations, etc.), and I wasn’t able to get to them, so they took care of it before it got out of hand. THANK YOU!

Any questions, feel free to PM or email me. By the way, did you know that you can email a person from the team simply by clicking the “email” button at the end  of one of their posts, right below the signature? :]

This is build’s first update of the 2008-2009 year.

Atlas was recently put into exceptional working condition for the GP FLL Demonstration on November 11th, last Tuesday. The demonstration was well-received by the FLL students as well as the  adults in attendance. Charlotte also made an appearance at said demonstration, and was also a point of interest of the crowd, though not in working order.

It has come to my attention that the Gearheads will be receiving a new Mill as a generous gift from GM in the near future. Many thanks to those who made this deal, and to GM for the donation! Assuredly, the build group will learn the functions of this new machinery for its safe operation.

Other news in build includes the ongoing hands-on training of rookies.  More updates coming!

The Grosse Pointe F.L.L. teams will be attending their competition this coming Saturday, the 22nd. Ian W., Kara B., Mr. C., and myself were the Gearheads in attendance for the practice tournament this afternoon. Though chaotic, it was a success, and provided the kids with a smaller-scale feel of how the competition will go. Each team was able to score some points each match, and the robots were quite impressive for rookie teams. All the luck to these students at competition this weekend!

Updated the backbones of our LabVIEW Diagnostics program.

Added error checking so it wouldn’t crash and burn if the bot wasn’t attached

Made a large portion of it a subVI (still messy, can be split up better).

Added lots of comments.

Changed the way GetVar works, made it a polymorphic VI to handle Long, Boolean, and Byte outputs.

Here’s the old one:

And the new one:

The data array carrying all the variables is on the left, the index is coming from the top, which is the output of a different GetVar VI. I had it increment the index number and then output it so I could get rid of a lot of numeric constants. Also makes it easier to reorder them. As you can see it’s outputting boolean.

(Also, look at the cute little Gearhead icon)

Starting off with a longish post… a lot has been going on.

We’ve been working on various tasks in the preseason with the goal of getting the new people to Control up to speed. Of course there is only so much that can be done given the new controller.

Anyway, we’ve been working on getting Charlotte working (our bot from the Rack’n'Roll game),  but due to mechanical issues it was not possible. Nevertheless it was a good learning experience. There is still a goal to get her working with the new cRIO controller, but the mechanical issues will have to be resolved first.

Speaking of the cRIO, we went to a presentation by Team 67 on the new system. They were a beta test team, so they were fairly familiar with it. It apparently weighs about 5 more pounds, and will take up more room, especially with the new speed controllers. The programming is very interested, and I am looking forward to playing with it and LabVIEW. To run a program, it must either be loaded to the flash memory, which takes a long time, or it can be loaded straight to RAM and run, which is much faster.

The networking is interesting, and I want to see how they are going to handle security of the wireless. The OI and RC communicate over WiFi, and the IPs are made static to 10.xx.xx.n, where xx.xx is the team number (so 11.89 for us). Several devices then hook up to it, such as tho OI, laptap, bridge to OI, etc. There is a ethernet camera which uses the cRIOs other ethernet port to communicate on.

Near the end of the presentation, they split it in two, one for C++ and one for LabVIEW. I went with the LabVIEW group, which actually contained a crash course in LabVIEW (in which I learned one new thing about tunneling out of structures, but that was it). I could see it was very useful to many people in the room. We won’t be able to dive into understanding how LabVIEW (or C++) really handles on the RC until we can play with it ourselves, but it seems very promising.

Today I was playing with LabVIEW to get myself better acquianted with it. I fixed up the diagnostics program we’ve been using, made it more organized and gave it the ability to handle errors without stopping. I basically went to the New… menu and went down to see what I could learn about each thing. I made a variety of subVIs used in the diagnostics program into a .LLB and figured out how to add that .LLB to the function pallete so I could easily access the said functions.

I also looked around to figure out SSC, or Source Code Control. LabVIEW does have integrated support for different system, but I couldn’t get any of it to work, and the Internet provided no clues. Just as I was giving up, I thought about our old system. We used Git, which is a simple and powerful version control system. I couldn’t think of any reason why we couldn’t use that system on the LabVIEW code, besigeds the code being in binary format. I pulled open my test project, opened up the directory in cmd prompt, and started a Git repository. I added the files, made the initial commit, and it worked flawlessly. I made same changes, and made another commit. Next I wanted to go back a version, so I started a new branch with the initial head. I checkedout the branch and was happy to see all the changes I had commited had been reverted. I am glad this works, though I can’t remember why I thought it wouldn’t. Anything is better than numerous backups of older versions in the form of zip files.

Other leaders are expected to begin blogging, I’ll begin pestering them and reminding them of their obligation. There is plenty to blog about.

All group leaders have an id to post their blogs.  Categories have been defined as the group names in the 2008-2009 Season.  The Previous season blog entries are available in the Previous 2007-2008 Season category.  I would suggest that you take some time to play with this. Though…anything you Publish will be Public.  As you can see (looking at the tool bar) you can also insert pictures and links to other places.   A lot of options to make this useful.   You could take pics of people working or JPEG of a drawing and post it.   You could also find a useful link in CD or on the web that you used for your group, etc….some resources.  There is a spell checker…use it.  You may have some learning to do…so just go do and we will figure this out.  Kara is the weblog admin.   If you need password or whatever assistance you can contact her.   Keep in mind that this will be public….your reputation and the team’s reputation are represented by your posts.  Categories are listed on the right as you write your blog entry…should be obvious as to which category your post goes. Use only one category at this time.   Please do not create any new categories.  Prepare multiple entriesto cathc up back to the beginning of the schol year.  Dates can be set for the date the update would have taken place if the blog was available and if you had blog posts ready.  Options when you create your entry: Do not allow comments, do not allow pings, when you are ready you can Publish..if it is a work in progress then you can set it to draft.

Mr. C.

The safety glass leashes were a huge success at the Pittsburgh Regional and GLR, along with our latest yellow diamond pin, Safety Gearhead. Imagery thought we’ll alternate the bandanas and safety glass leashes every other year, so the 2008-2009 season we’d order bandanas, but it depends on our budget.

    We were restricted yet again, but this time even more so. We were not able to have Internet access nor were we able to broadcast a network within the stadium. But we were still able to record everything and it all went as smoothly as at the Pittsburgh Regional.

This time however we were able to provide anyone that came up to us with custom printouts with their own selected custom sorts. That’s right! We have a print feature now!

I’m very sorry that the information has not found its way to the Internet as of yet, but hopefully within the next couple of days the data we collected will get there and the sort and match pages will be opened up.

Since we were unable to have Internet access at the venue, we instead had to rely on the GHX laptop that I installed an Apache server on. We were able to broadcast our own wireless signal though, and it worked perfectly. GHX was able to reach the pits and the rest of the stands as well. Everything was moved smoothly until several glitches were found, none of which were cataclysmic but still they needed fixing. They weren’t too hard to fix, and so the website past the first test.

The new data we collected still needs to be uploaded onto the Internet. As of now, the lap-top’s information has been backed-up twice since all information was entered. I expect that this weekend will hold enough free time to allow me to upload the information and fix/adjust anything on the internet version. I will also open the sort-feature and Match-details to the public.

To test out the scouting system for this year, several of our members went to the rookie Kettering competition. They came back with some bad news! The 4 person scouting system was way too hard to pull off, so we are going to have to pull it back up to a 6 person scouting system. The new scouting sheets can be found on the new Gearhead Crossing Web site’s FAQs page. 

The new download is provided in a Zip format, and the forms and the Sorting System are separated into two files.

Finally, the website is up and running on the internet. It took awhile because of the way I set up the database queries. On the system I was using, it didn’t care if I used capital letters when making table calls. Well the server thats running it now does!

But after awhile, Josh and I got it to work. We even uploaded some test data, check out team 1189! There still seems to be some problems with how the website handles the links since there are 2 URLs that point to the same website. Heres what I mean:

• http://gpgearheads.org/ghx/2008
• http://gearheadcrossing.org/2008

Both URLs point to the same page and this causes some problems, so I fixed it so the page wont show up if you try and visit the first one, it will just give you a link to go to the new site.

Well, every page has been completed! I’m still testing to make sure everything is running correctly, and that the database is being edited correctly for every operation. I’m also working on a README for anyone that wants to learn how the code works, the public interface works, and anything else that I can think of.

The mobile edition has also been completed and is fully functional. It even has a sort function that is just as easy to use as the regular version. Overall, I’m pleased at how well things are proceeding and I hope I can get things up on the internet soon.

This is my first post in a while, but I have an update on what’s going on with the shirt, hoodie, and swag orders we placed in late December.Dr. D emailed me and confirmed that the shirts, hoodies, and swag are in production as of this past week. I should have the week the orders will be arriving in the next week or so.

Afer some delay (ok, a lot of delay), Mallory S. and I have managed to update the old content to create the 2008 Gearhead’s website! There’s not much left to do content-wise, so I’m planning on finishing (checking for spelling, grammar, accuracy, etc) everything tonight. Group leaders, thank you for your updates–the miracle that we performed this afternoon couldn’t have happened without them!

Yesterday, work on the BOM, or bill of Materials, got a Nitrous injection. The list of parts and materials used in this year’s robot started Saturday, but most of the important work was done Sunday. A mentor familiar with the most interesting capabilities of Excel worked with me and another student in order to create an easily managed and well organized list that can answer almost any question concerning what is on the 2008 Overdrive Robot.Other than work on the BOM, design has reached a standstill, all work has been handed off to the Build and Prototype group in order to finish the robot in time.

Sorry about not posting for the past week, I have been busy designing the robot and handing off prints to the build team.  Hopefully I’ll be able to help with building sometime, but designing is always fun.  Anyways, I’ll get to it.

Over the last week the design and build groups have been working even harder in order in order to finish the robot on time.  The design group has handed off chain specifications as well as elevator and mast designs to the build group for construction.

The axle assembly has been going well and the new half inch hex axle design, which I am proud to say I helped create, looks highly promising.  The half inch hexagonal axles, which are about 5.6 inches long, and the hexagonal sleeves, which allow the axle to rotate in the IGUS Iglide bearings, have been fabricated.  Welding the sprockets to the aluminum hubs, or “sandwiches,” as well as final assembly have yet to take place.

The chain sizes involved look very well calculated.  The procession of chain goes like so:  First, a sprocket “sandwich,” or two sprockets on an aluminum hub, mounted on the transmission axle transfers rotational force through two chains to the middle and back wheels.  The transmission sandwich is unique-it is the only sandwich with a key way. All other sandwiches rest on half inch diameter hexagonal axles.  So, now we have four wheels driven-remember there is one of these systems on each side.  A second sprocket “sandwich” attached to the middle hexagonal axle then transfers the same force to the front wheel.  The middle and transmission axles are the only hubs that need to hold two sprockets.  So far, the chain lengths match up perfectly.  (Except for one chain length, the axle position for the transmission on the left rail is off just enough to upset us, but it is being taken care of)

The mast has seen its main components fabricated and the elevator, or trolley for the arm whichever you prefer,  has seen most of its fabrication as well.  The mast and elevator operate like so:  The mast is comprised of three parts on both sides, a 2×2 aluminum tube with a .75 inch slot on the inside surface allows an elevator to move up and down inside it.  These lengths of aluminum are at a 80 degree angle, which allows the capturing of track balls when the mast is shifted all the way to the back.  Vertical supports all the way in the back support the system and aluminum stringers keep the mast from falling over.  The last part is a plate, which holds both together at the top with 4×1/4-20 bolts.  The elevator is quite simple as well, two vertical 2×1 aluminum tubes and two crosspieces of the same size comprise the frame.  The arm will attach to this elevator via four .25 inch thick plates, I personally used stress analysis software on Autodesk Inventor and compared different configurations for lightness and durability.  They look pretty cool as well.

Well, that’s all for now, check back in about three days everybody!

On Saturday we were lucky enough to have Clemenson Hall, for the second Saturday in a row, for driving practice. We started a little late but because of the team working together and listening to each other, we made up for lost time and ran more efficient trials! A+ guys! This goes to show that practice does help and that the team is growing together!

Keep it up! We are going to have a strong showing this year at competitions!

If you’ve noticed in the forums under Imagery Managment, there’s new posts for the bot name.

Actually, I was given the choice to select the name as Imagery Group Leader or have the whole team take a vote on a name…….I’ve selected the name of our bot after going through the forums.

The 2008 GP Gearheads bot name is Atlas, though common, many fellow gearheads along with me feel it’s appropriate for our bot this season.

On Saturday the school allowed us use Clemenson Hall from 12:30-3:00 as a field to drive the robot on. It worked out nice and we ended up burning up all six batteries we brought! All of the drivers that came dove very well, but a few stood out from the rest. Over all, it was a great day for practice and will prevent problems from occurring later on. All ready we have practice more than last year and we have reserved Clemenson again for next weekend.

Practicing at Clemenson is bringing us more than just driving experience, we are working together to setup and take down; and we are going through the motions for the competitions. Also, since we are putting the robot through such strenuous tests (roughly 2 hours of constant running), we are finding little things, things like increased wheel wear on certain wheels, are going to be useful to know before we go into the first competition.

OK, a lot has been done, revised, and tested for the new site.

• The ‘Add/Edit Game year’ feature has now been added and successfully tested. With this done, the rest of the site is coming into place a lot easier.  (All the global variables now can get their values from the database)
• The mobile feature has been tested, and it works. The site just needs a little revision to fit on the smaller screens.
• I’ve now begun work on the ‘Add/Edit Venue’ and ‘Add/Edit Matches’  pages simultaneously. They have similar features and will both impact each other.

Over all, it is beginning to look like the site i had planed out in the beginning. So I’m pleased.

Our work sessions are scheduled as follows for the duration of the 2008 FRC build season ( starting 01/07/08 through 02/19/08 ) -

- Mondays through Fridays, 6:00-9:00 pm
- Saturdays, 12:00-9:00 pm, with the weekly team meeting starting at 12:00, and dinner at 5:00 pm in the 2nd floor Art Classroom for those who are working at this time
- Sundays, 1:00-6:00 pm

This schedule may change as circumstances dictate, so please check the forums and team calendar daily for updates! There’s always something for you to do, and many hands make for light work!

Today the bot’s frame rails were completely finished on the mill and now the chassis assembly has begun!

On Thursday 1/23 after school, I met up with Kara, Josh, and Mr. C to start brainstorming for the 2008 Website’s new style/image.

I’ll be trying different things with color and logos using HTML code; the GP Gearheads website is going to be “pimped!”

The chassis is beginning to come together.  Insets for retainment tabs and holes for bolts were milled into the frame rails yesterday.  The insets make space for circular tabs on the corner plates and strengthen the joints between the frame rails.  Helio coils will be anchored into the frame rails in order to create stronger threads, and eighth of an inch of aluminum is not enough to hold a bolt.

The lightening holes and transmission slots will be milled Saturday and Sunday, the 26th and 27th.  These are the finishing touches and will allow us to install our new hexagonal shaft drive train and super shifters.  I know I’m excited about seeing our new design perform in driving tests.

The next step is to begin final construction of  the arm and elevator.  To do that we’ll start creating the base for the structure–parallel  rails on top of the frame that also serve as transmissions mounts.  A group of students have been experimenting with different manipulator configurations and will be ready to explain their findings to the design and build team.

In the past couple days the Build and Prototype group has been working in full swing. The Design and Engineering group lead by Charles W. has been pounding out final part designs and NC paths for the mill. Peter S. as making parts on the Lathe, Matt S. and other Gearheads have been work on the prototype arm and manipulator with great success, I have been taking the new NC mill paths and cutting the new bot rails and other bot parts on the mill.

A couple days ago we received the data logger that I mentioned before. We had to run out and get an SD card and a reader, but those are easy enough to come across. I did a quick hookup with a breadboard to the TTL port of the RC. I didn’t fully explore the configuration, but I made the RC write to that port instead and I’ve confirmed that it does indeed log. I’ll need to configure it more to make it make a log which can be read by my LabVIEW diagnostics program.

We also received the ultrasonic range finder. We’ve yet to play with it. As I said before, that’s a lower priority. A more important task is to use the encoder to get wheel speed so PID can be used to get both sides to drive the same speed. Which I played with today. I copied the PID routines used last year, but that was originally for powering a motor until it gets to a position. This doesn’t work to well with the drive train because after it gets to the speed we don’t want it to slow down. So basically before I had to leave, it was increasing the power to get to the speed, then decreasing it as it got closer to the correct speed. When it decreases, the speed goes down too much. I’m not sure. I’ll just have to play with it some more.

Today in the shop we offered the drivers test. The following took it:

Al, Mark , Kara , Ian , Mr. C

Overall, the test scores were good; but we will see tomorrow because Charlie, Mike and Peter are going to take it then. The Coaches test will also be available to take also. Remember, the coaches test will be taken in addition too the drivers test.

On Saturday, (tomorrow), we have Clemenson Hall to stage the driving test using Charlotte.

Hey everyone, I’m coming along!

Members of the design team have been hard at work making parts for Mike P. to mill.  Mike has not only been kicking out parts, but training Andy W.  Looks like the Gearheads may have found someone to take Mike’s spot at the mill next year already.

Lately, Josh C. has been setting up his laptop in the workshop to tweak my drive controls.  It looks good so far!  Josh has also been meeting with Strategy to figure out how to control me out in the field.  It’s important that controls has a clear understanding of what Strategy wants out of me in order to create an effective control system.

As most of you already know, this year’s game includes the movement of the big, red or blue trackballs.  So, in order to manipulate trackballs, I’m going to have an arm!  The arm implements pneumatics in order to open and close my gripping pincer.  The Gearheads have been working hard to get it to perform correctly, but it requires the balance of gripping power and the time needed to build up pressure. If the arm can’t build up enough pressure, the grip on the ball will be weak.  If the grip on the ball is really strong, it takes to long for me to build up air pressure.  So the build team needs to find a good balance.

Overall I’d say the team has bounced back from a slightly hindered week of finals and everyone’s back in the swing of things.  I’m being worked on everyday, and everyday in the shop the Gearheads make great progress.  Thanks guys, and keep up the good work!

We had more issues with the LabVIEW diagnostics program. Apparently the LabVIEW serial thing I was using had a termination character of ASCII 10 (a newline) on by default. Whenever a newline was sent over the port, wham. Everything else after that was marked as 0. Whoops, can’t believe I didn’t notice that earlier. Also, the two 255s in a row being used as the header flag didn’t pan out as much as I wanted. I’m not sure why, but when two 255s showed up naturally (I didn’t think that’d happen much, but when sending a negative long variable… yeah.) So now the header is four 128s in a row. If that happens in nature, it deserves to crash. Seriously.

Another thing about sending negatives. A negative is actually just a really being positive number. I can’t seem to find a LabVIEW function which converts this to a negative. When I do it using what I thought would work, by giving a conversion function a really big number, it just returns the upper bound of the variable. Boo. I think I’m going to have to convert it myself. From memory, this is done by checking the most significant bit, if it’s a 1, then NOT the entire thing and add 1. I wonder if I can make a function which can do this for multiple variable types.. I bet I can. I did something quickly like that for just Words (16 bits), need to figure out how to do it for multiple variable types.. That can be done later.

We ordered a steering wheel for possible use with the chicklet. Not sure if we’ll be able to use it, but we’ll have it in case we can. We also ordered one or two (surprisingly expensive) string pots for use on our bot. I hope they work out, it’d be a shame to have spent that kind of money one something we’ll just end up hacking together.

The driver’s selection process is now available for the team to see. The Coach Selection process is on the way. Both will involve a written test.The driver’s written test is 20 questions long and covers section 7 about the game. You should be able to score a 90% or higher on the test if you want to be a driver, so read the rules.To be a coach you are responsible to know section 9 as well as section 7. This test will be longer and more difficult than the drivers test considering the Coach needs to know the rules AND how to play the game.

Milling is going forward at full bore, with plenty of parts to make and much more math on the way; the milling crew is going to be really busy.  Mike P. started it off with frame corner plates a few days ago and is now moving on to adjuster blocks.  The blocks will allow us to make finite tweaks to chain tension and robot maneuverability.  Andy W. joined him and is learning how to use the mill quickly–it looks like we’ll have a capable miller next year.
The mill uses .nc files, the first of which made the corner plates.  More are on their way for the frame rails themselves, they make up most of the robot chassis.  I am currently working on the frame rails and will have them done soon.