February 6th: Robotics Meeting

Today was OK.

In today's robotics meeting, we got to work installing an ethernet switch for our robot so that we would have enough ethernet ports for connecting to our driver station using ethernet. We had a really older ethernet switch from 2019, before the pandemic. It was a regular ethernet switch, so it was powered using an AC adapter. We took a mallet and took apart the AC adapter to get the leads of the wire and installed the power onto the VRM. It was a success! It's somewhat jankey, but it's fully functional! For me, the only legality concern is with the color of the wire, but with some further stripping and some electrical tape, I'm sure we can get up to code.

The engineering team got the parts for their custom cut intake system, so they got to work setting that up. They also cut more wood outside for our robot cart.

For the programming team, we split up again. Some of us tested the IMU accelerometer integration, some of us worked more with setting up the Limelight, and some of us got to work with more of the gyroscope and the odometry of the robot. We also documented the code for our POS system.

For the Limelight, we wanted to import an AI model. Unfortunately, it forbade us in the absence of a Google Coral USB Accelerator, so we'll be purchasing that for us to use soon. We hope that we can use it to detect notes and go to notes automatically. Since we have a tank drivetrain, it's going to be finicky for the driver to move the robot to the proper location of the note, so hopefully, the Limelight will abstract that process away, making it easier for the driver to move the robot.

For the IMU, we took the electrical board outside and ran with it, carrying it in our arms. However, the readings were still pretty inaccurate! We'll have to troubleshoot this later. Although we didn't see the results we wanted to, we were still pretty productive today.

Thanks for reading,
Issac