November 27th: Robotics Meeting and Being Tired

Today was good.

There was a Robotics Meeting today after school. Many people came, which made me glad because we need as many people as possible to help finish the robot!

Anyways, the engineering team continued to build the kicker mechanism of the robot, while the electrical team continued designing the electrical board of the robot. 

For the programming team, the programming team leads first had to conduct an interview for a new member. Then, when we came back, we began the work to start programming the robot. We first had to create the initial project on WPILIB, and create a GitHub repository to store it, as well as uploading the initial project files onto the remote repository. It took around an hour to finish it since we were all rusty with Git commands. Anyways, when we were finally done, we asked the electrical team for the port numbers of the motor controllers so that the rookie members could began modifying the drive base code that they used for SimBot for the new robot. Unfortunately, they weren't taught about how the can bus worked, but luckily I figured out the pattern by looking at SimBot's electrical board.

The pattern, is that the first device corresponds to the first device connected on the can bus, starting from the RoboRIO. It's a pretty simple pattern to figure out, but I couldn't find anything online for this pattern.

Anyways, after we learned about the ports for the motor controllers, we took note of it, and began discussing about the drive base. The drive base for the new robot is using omni wheels for the front, and traditional rubber wheels for the back. It's a bit different compared to SimBot, but it should still function as a differential drive, which I had to teach to the programming team.

Anyways after that, I lectured about accessing and understanding the documentation of the WPILIB C++ API docs so that they could begin programming by themselves. Afterwards, we assigned tasks on who will be programming the drive base. The priority goes to those who have programmed the least, so the members who worked on programming the drive base for SimBot will be guiding the members who haven't touched FRC programming through the steps.

Anyways, after we assigned who will be doing what, it was getting close to 6, so we'll be actually programming tomorrow. Hopefully we will be productive tomorrow!

Last night I slept at 2 AM, so during 5th period I could barely pay attention. When I got back home, after I ate a snack, I slept for 2 hours straight. I really hope I at least sleep at 1 AM tonight, which gives me an extra hour of sleep. Basically, I need to fix my sleep schedule or else I will get nothing done.

Thanks for reading,

Issac