March 30th: Robotics Meeting and EWOW

Today was not bad.

In today's robotics meeting, we got a lot done.

The electrical team fixed the wires for our redline motors that were for the lifter mechanism. Now, the engineering team needs to reinstall the lifter.

The programming team got a lot done today. We mainly focused on PID control for our drive base. In the morning we did some initial tests, but we went in a little blind. We also got some documentation done in the mean time since it had been a lot of time since we touched some branches in our test GitHub repository.

After lunch, the robot went to the engineering team so that they could work on it. In the mean time, our other mentor, Dr Max, came in to properly teach us PID. It was very helpful! It helped us better understand the inner workings of PID, so hopefully when we tune it, it'll function a lot better. When we went outside with the robot to test, we noticed that the drive base was very jittery since we were forcing in a lot of power into the drive base motors at once. This caused the battery to drain too quickly and brownout protection was stepping in. So, we found a solution to prevent this from happening (current limiters,) but we will be testing that later.

We'll definitely be meeting a few days during the weekday of Spring Break. Hopefully everything will be finished before the East Bay Regional!

After school I watched Eleven Words of Wisdom 1B. My response for last week's episode was "I upgraded to three from two in the binary number system!" and I got 3,655th place, with an average score of 65.20% Although I didn't gain a life, I'm happy that I scored decently! Hopefully I continue to survive through the competition! Good luck to the other EWOWers!

Thanks for reading,
Issac