November 28th: Robotics Meeting

Today was not bad.

I did not want to get out of bed this morning, I slept maybe 40 minutes earlier compared to yesterday but I was still tired! When I got home I didn't take a nap, which was an improvement compared to yesterday.

Anyways, there was a Robotics Meeting today after school. Less people came today and not much was done, but at least we are inching close to a complete robot!

The engineering team continued to construct the kicker mechanism for the robot, while the Electrical team planned to create a battery holder for the battery.

For the Programming team, I helped them plan their code and the object-oriented structure of the objects required. Then, we assigned tasks to create the drive train, which included adding the dependencies, declare and initialize the motors and controllers, declare the drive system, read values from the controller, and lastly actually moving the robot corresponding to the control scheme. First, we had a lot of trouble importing the correct library because the computer was being slow. We actually imported the correct library but we just had to build so that the issue resolved. Then, we had to declare and initialize the motors, which didn't take too long. Afterwards, we began to declare the drive system, but we ran out of time.

As it turns out we imported the wrong dependency for the motor controllers, which are the TalonSRXs. We imported the TalonSRX.h dependency instead of the WPI_TalonSRX.h dependency, which meant that we couldn't use the abstracted drive systems that WPILIB already included. I'll bring up the error tomorrow.

I'm rather fortunate that I'm not too busy at the moment with other classes or clubs, because I want to dedicate as much time to Robotics so that we'll be ready before competition. I'm hoping that we can finish the code for the drive train tomorrow.

Thanks for reading,

Issac