March 11th: Robotics Meeting

Today could've been better.

Not many people were present in today's robotics meeting, which is really unfortunate because we're so close to competition. The few mechanical members focused on the intake and the algae cannon. I focused on getting our RSL working. It was troublesome getting the right connector to plug the RSL into the roboRIO. When I finally wired up the RSL and plugged it in though, the RSL wasn't functioning at all. I was really confused and tested it on the old robot where it worked. Finally, when we used a multimeter to retrieve the output voltages, it was realized that the RSL port on our roboRIO wasn't working!

We first tried re-imaging it, which didn't help. I decided to do the seemingly stupid (at the time) task of disassembling the roboRIO to see if we could get anything. We saw that some components were getting crusted and had been scratched off. Connecting two and two together with the broken through bolt holes, we realized that the roboRIO, during installation onto this year's electrical board, was broken because the bolts were screwed in too far in, and they broke through the bolt holes and began screwing into components in the electrical board.

The solder for the RSL port looked really off, and a resistor fell off. It's really unfortunate to have a critical part of the robot be non-functional this close to competition, but fortunately, we still have a roboRIO we stripped from last year's robot, Scar2D2. We'll try to resolder the RSL port for the broken roboRIO, but this is a really annoying set back.

Thanks for reading,
Issac