February 9th: Rigo's Birthday, Robotics Meeting, Lunar New Year Eve

Today was good.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RIGO! Even though you live further away now, I hope you had a great birthday!

We had a robotics meeting today. We didn't have school because Lunar New Year is around the corner (tomorrow.) Today was mainly focused on the engineering team, finishing up the prototype of the robot. 

For the programming team, some of us finished estimating the position of the robot with the encoder and gyroscope information, and we did a lot of testing of the code. Everything works fine, so hopefully when we have the robot, we can finish programming it very soon.

We also did a lot of research about another camera for our robot. Since we're using tank drive, for the human driver, moving the robot to specific places on the field will be difficult. As a result, we want to automate the process of driving as much as possible, using cameras! This will be the most helpful for picking up notes (intake) and launching them (outake) However, we only have one camera (the limelight) currently that can process apriltags. We will probably also be using the limelight for the intake side to detect notes, and whatever other camera we have on the outtake side so it can detect april tags.

The classroom had some raspberry pis lying around, so saw if they met the minimum requirements for PhotonVision, which is the software you can install to automatically detect april tags. However, the raspberry pis only had 1GB of ram, so they were unsuitable. We continued to do some more research on the best model for us. We also arrived to the problem of powering the pi on our robot, but unfortunately, our electrical lead is in Mexico. Hopefully we'll impress the SHPE when they arrive tomorrow!

Anyways, after the meeting, I went home. For dinner, we ate lots of yummy food, because it's Lunar New Year's Eve.

Thanks for reading,
Issac