Meeting 9/18/16

Programming:
This meeting was shorter than previous meetings due to the 2016-2017 Kickoff that took place in the second half of the meeting. We finished the code for all robot functionalities (Intake, Pneumatics, Pop, etc.), and were in the process of testing the code, when the meeting ended. We still need to try running over the defenses, finish testing all code, working on autonomous code, program the shooter, and practice, practice, practice. The more iterations we run on our code, the more errors we will find before THOR, and the better the robot will perform. 

Meeting 9/17/16

Programming:
Shooter:
This meeting, we focused on getting the shooter operational. We wanted to create a table that would take the distance as an input, and calculate the RPM necessary to shoot a goal. However, we ran into many difficulties with this. When we gave the shooter the RPM of 3000, and checked what it was actually reading (through the encoder), it would give a value significantly lower (around 2000). We are not sure why this has been happening, nor which value is actually correct. What we are probably going to do is only use one value to run our shooter, and use the inbuilt PID to keep the shooter consistent. This means, instead of worrying which reading is correct, we will just program everything in the unit of one of them (in the above example, 3000).
 Turret:
After this, we worked on the turret. We had to be really careful, because the turret can only move 30 degrees in either direction, and we didn't want to accidentally break the turret. After we determined how the turret worked, and after we set up our soft limits to make sure nothing would break, we started integrating the vision data into the code. Currently, we are able to make the turret rotate to lock onto the target by using vision. The one problem we are running into is the fact that the camera is a few inches to the right of the shooter, and so when we lock on to the target with vision, the shooter will be shooting slightly off. Currently, we are looking into ways to solve this issue.

Meeting 9/16/16

Programming:
In he first half of the meeting, the programming team assisted the mechanical team in making progress towards finishing the robot for THOR. After this, the basic drive functionality for the robot was ready, so we tested the drive code. There were some issues with communicating with the motor controllers, but it was soon resolved. The robot moved very well, and there was a significant positive difference between this robot and the practice robot the programming team had been working on the past few weeks. Later in the meeting, the shooter subsection was finished, and attached. We created code to run the shooter at a given percent power and tried to use it. It worked for small speeds, but after a certain point (around 70% power), the shooter would stop responding. After some time, we realized this was because the motor controllers had been swapped for the turret and shooter from last year to now, so the motor controller operating the shooter used to operate the turret, and had soft limits which were triggered once certain speeds were reached. After disabling these limits, and setting it to coast mode instead of brake mode, we were able to manually test a few shots before the meeting ended. Next up is tuning the vision and shooter.