Omnimaga
General Discussion => Technology and Development => Other => Topic started by: Ashbad on January 22, 2011, 07:51:21 pm
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I just came back from a robotics competition today, hosted by FIRST FTC. We won 2 awards, one for inivation (kudos to our hardware gurus) and one for winning in our final alliance overall. Apparently my team says that without my robot AI code we would've lost half our games, and instead we were 9/10 ;D
does anyone else happen to participate in this really fun competition? If so, is anyone else going to state/national yet? If so, look out for team 226 ;D
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I just came back from a robotics competition today, hosted by FIRST FTC. We won 2 awards, one for inivation (kudos to our hardware gurus) and one for winning in our final alliance overall. Apparently my team says that without my robot AI code we would've lost half our games, and instead we were 9/10 ;D
does anyone else happen to participate in this really fun competition? If so, is anyone else going to state/national yet? If so, look out for team 226 ;D
I am portuguese, but I'll still go, I wanna pwn your team :evillaugh:
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I mentor a FIRST team. Great job :)
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I helped my Tech teacher start a robotics team last year, at my old school. Unfortunately, that meant I can't be in it this year.
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My school is entering for the first time this year, they send an amazing amount of parts to you.
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That is really cool Ashbad! Congratulations on doing so well!
We never had anything cool like that in my high school or college. :( I feel cheated. :D
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lol all of you :)
Ranman: that's too bad, sorry about that :(
Guy: yeah, quite a few parts, though most teams only use like 20% of them :D
Binder: nice, you started one? That's actually pretty cool. Did it do well last year?
Qwerty: you are a mentor? Wow, that's awesome! Are you over 18 or something? Or are you a junior mentor?
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I'm in Robotics competition hosted by KIPR called botball.
Anyone else here in that?
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Yeah, over 18.
Can't say much about this year's team though. Almost all freshman who don't care enough to actually work. The people who cared what they were doing left last year :(
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Cool! We're in the middle of the FRC build season (Team 180!).
So uh... mind building us a minibot? :P
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No, but a high school near mine goes to that, called Thomas Jefferson High School (the number one high school in the entire country of america, and possibly in the top ten for the entire world), and they always score really high. though we kicked their FTC team's ass today :)
EDIT: Erik, our FRC team just built ours, and we discovered that simplest is the key ;D
Ours basically is just two wheels attached to motors (they form a right angle to ensure grip), a battery, and about 10 wires :)
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I'm doing FRC -- it's my first year ever with robotics, and it looks like it's going to be loads of fun.
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Our school only does Vex and TSA competitions in robotics =P One of our teams made it to world for Vex already. Sadly, not mine... but...
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I'm on my school's robotics team, however I did not go to that competition. Good luck with the FRC season to Ashbad and everyone else doing robotics!
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I don't know if this is similar to yours, but I'm in an RC (I know, lame :P) sumo match. 30 cm cubed size limit.
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Darn I wish they had this when I went to hi school. That would've been fun.
Moved to technology/hardware sub-forum
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Wow that sounds really cool! I know me and my fellow classmates in CompSci sometimes had inter-class competitions, but never anything outside, I would so love to do a competition like this!
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I'm participating in a contest too with my line-following robot... :)
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I'm writing a line following program for our robot.
How did you get yours to work? Fortunately this is only a small part of the competition though
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I'm sorry to say I couldn't have done more for my team's programming (team 589) this year.
But I am giving the rookies a crash course in programming, so if they can't program this year, they can next year :D
As far as I know, we're using both the sensors and the Axis camera for tracking - we're going to recycle the Axis camera tracking code from last year and have the sensors as a backup.
Any thoughts on the minibot? I hate how it has to have a Lego NXT Mindstorms controller if you want a microcontroller... why not an Arduino or something else
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i was part of a FIRST team once...
it was a community team, because our school is the opposite of tech savvy, and i only did it one year because we had meh coaching. good luck to all you peoples, though!
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EDIT: Erik, our FRC team just built ours, and we discovered that simplest is the key ;D
Ours basically is just two wheels attached to motors (they form a right angle to ensure grip), a battery, and about 10 wires :)
Haha, sounds similar to ours. (well, probably most teams too!)
We've got it so it can go up the pole decently, enough for some bonus points. Getting it DOWN, though...
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...isn't part of the competition ;)
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...isn't part of the competition ;)
yeah, just gotta get it up, I don't think it even has to stay up as long as it doesn't fall off the poll. :)
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So, my team just got a very skimmed down crash course on the electronics. We're a rookie team with no experience whatsoever, and almost no idea what to do. Any advice?
Edit: Hardware, electronics or programming. I think we're going to need all the help we can get.
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I'd be happy to help with any mechanical stuff (especially pneumatics), although I can't physically make it because of the whole distance thing.
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Cool, thanks. Do you mind if I wait until after my group meets again and has determined where we're going to start?
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...isn't part of the competition ;)
yeah, just gotta get it up, I don't think it even has to stay up as long as it doesn't fall off the poll. :)
Well if you can't get it down, they just about tear it off the pole. We'd rather keep it intact as much as possible.
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So, I've been assigned as programmer and my first job is to figure out how to get a motor to run, except i have no idea how to do that.
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what are you guys programming in and what exactly are you programming? I might be able to help
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We're using LabView. Robotics competition sponsored by USFIRST.
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OK that is not one I know sorry that I can not be of help.
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Nevermind, we found a tutorial for labview and the programming makes sense now, the compact rio just doesnt seem to like accepting information from the computer.
EDIT: We got the Compact Rio to work but the digital sidecar says there is a communication error, but we have everything wired up correctly.
Edit 2: I wonder if it is possible to control a robot like this with a calculator. Because these robots can be programmed using C/C++ and Java.
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Edit 2: I wonder if it is possible to control a robot like this with a calculator. Because these robots can be programmed using C/C++ and Java.
Funnily enough, I was contemplating doing that. You know, hooking my calc up a USB port and controlling the robot with it...
But I'm nowhere near good enough to do that, though it would be EPIC.
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I wonder if it is possible to control a robot like this with a calculator. Because these robots can be programmed using C/C++ and Java.
Haha, we were considering trying to control the robot with a Wii remote or Kinect, just for fun.
(We didn't)
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So I'm sure we're all on track for Tuesday's ship, as always!
...
AAAAAaAAAAaaAAAaaaAAaaaaAaaaaa
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Do you mean the competition ends on Tuesday?
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Do you mean the competition ends on Tuesday?
Haha, in all the excitement I forgot this topic was originally about FTC, not FRC.
For FRC, Tuesday is the day we have to be done building the robot so it can be shipped off. We meet up with it again at whatever our first regional is.
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Yup -- and I'm starting to panic a little because the lifting mechanism (which is a vital component of the robot) broke. It appears that the design was fatally flawed to start with, which would have been nice to know about earlier X.X
(This is the reason why I've barely posted anything in the past week-ish, if anybody is wondering)
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Send me a PM if you want help with the mechanics.
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same, actually. What mechanism does yours use? an Arm? our arm is so well programmed by our other FRC programmer (not me, I'm the trainee) that it uses PID controllers he made better than the supplied libs.
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Thanks for offering, but it's fine.
As it turned out, our previous design would have never worked (so no point in trying to repair or fix it), and our mentors somehow pulled a backup plan out of nowhere, so we're not totally dead in the water :)
@Ashbad: Ours involved a sort of scissor-lift thing which would move up by turning a screw. We don't have anything as complicated as an arm -- a lot of the people in Robotics last year graduated, so we're fairly inexperienced.
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I see :(
it sounds cool, but difficult. I mean our arm is complex and took a long time to make, but most of the amazingness is the programming, which sometimes can turn a failed design into a competitor again :)
actually the scissor lift thing sounds cool, but I can see how something that complex can be unreliable x.x
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We've got a pretty rad arm design this year, in my opinion.
We're planning on going to Orlando, FL and Charleston, SC regionals. Anyone else gonna be running into us?
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not that I know of Imma gonna go to NJ
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We're almost ready to ship. At school working on it right now. Our arm is a simple pulley with a fulcrum to lift the "arm" which is actually just a pole with a block to keep the piece from sliding all the way down. Building the crate and adding the bumpers at the moment. I don't think thats too bad for a rookie team that had about 3 weeks worth of build time.
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I have to say, I'm extremely disappointed in my team. I doubt there will be a club next year.
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oh, that really sucks :(
what makes you so upset about your team?
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Only about three members actually did anything on a ten person team, if you discount what the mentors did. Basically, the robot isn't built, no programming has been written, none of the required documentation has been made (such as the parts list), and the robot can't even communicate with the computer. That's to say nothing of the fact that all of the important accessories such as the arm weren't even started as of yesterday when I checked in on them.
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oh, I see why O.O x.x
Also, no programming whatsoever?? those are some lazy kids x.x If they're doing it in Java/C++, they're screwed, it'll take them too long, though if they use LabView then they might be able to code something quick...
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Well, I can't say that I blame them as much about the programming. The people responsible for the electronics only made the connections Friday. It hasn't really been possible to program.
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oh, I see x.x
for some reason I noticed that there are always fewer programmers, and they try to work hard but the hardware people are a bit more lazy x.x
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oh, I see x.x
for some reason I noticed that there are always fewer programmers, and they try to work hard but the hardware people are a bit more lazy x.x
That was actually the fault of the girls. I'm not saying anything applies to all girls, but the ones on my team don't like to work. It's a case of too little motivation for a project of that scale.
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FRC does seem quite large and intimidating, good thing our other programmer besides me is amazing at programming, and our mentor for java programming is even more awesome (and good at nicknaming, my name is "snooki" :P)
FTC is probably much less of a difficulty to compete in, you have more time and it's a bit less complex. I just am worried about next year when I'm the main programmer for FRC O.O
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We are having trouble fitting our design into the restrictions :( the bumpers block our case, the case is supposed to open using hinges, with 2 plexiglass sides for easy viewing, but the wooden boards prevent us from opening the case :'(
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Qwerty and guy602665 that sucks. Good luck :/
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So Ship has come and gone. Hopefully y'all were able to work out the issues you had!
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We managed to work out all of our problems with the main robot. But the minibot is annoying us because they didn't send us any of their mandatory parts for it. :( We are having issues with designs as well.
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We managed to work out all of our problems with the main robot. But the minibot is annoying us because they didn't send us any of their mandatory parts for it. :( We are having issues with designs as well.
Mandatory parts does not sound fun. What kind of parts?
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We managed to work out all of our problems with the main robot. But the minibot is annoying us because they didn't send us any of their mandatory parts for it. :( We are having issues with designs as well.
Mandatory parts does not sound fun. What kind of parts?
Only the minibot has mandatory parts. The theme of the game this year is "combining" game components from the three FIRST leagues: FRC (robotics), FTC (tech challenge), and FLL (Lego). The FTC contribution is the minibot, which must be built from the FTC kit of parts.
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/ftc/content.aspx?id=17121
Perhaps it's all just an excuse to sell more ;D
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Unfortunately, we dont have any other teams doing FTC or FLL, so we had to order the parts separately online. The battery alone is $50.
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I was entered into a IRL sumo-bot competeion for the regional science Olympiad
robot was disqualified but I got to enter in the tournament for disqualified robots `-`
I lost....
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Our robot got first in alliance at botball
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We're runners-up at the FRC Orlando regional! Woohoo! ;D
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I was in the Bayou Regional. 21st out of 38, team 3782.
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Just got back from the Charleston regional.
We're going to St Louis!
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Nice. I hope you win :D
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good luck erik! ;D
we got close... very close :P but we didn't go because we lost in the semi finals. but apparently, our FRC team is getting much better now, like our FTC one did (which is going to nationals next week!) and we're sure to win and go to St. Louis next year ;)
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Just got back from the Charleston regional.
We're going to St Louis!
Well, maybe I'll see you there then. ;)
oh, btw look who's going to be there
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So nationals was an absolute blast.
Surprise Black Eyed Peas concert on Friday, and I high fived Morgan Freeman and got a picture with Woodie Flowers and Dean Kamen. We had some rough luck in the qualifying matches and didn't get selected by an alliance to go on to eliminations, but oh well. It was fun!
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I didn't get to see Morgan Freeman. We went back to the hotel just before he showed up.
Also, we won!
By the powers of guessing, Team 111?
We got Freeman to wear our button on his hat. I might have a picture around here somewhere.
EDIT:
(http://i.imgur.com/8EKb9.jpg)
Maybe a bit hard to make out, but that red thing is our button!
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double posting tiem :P
(http://i.imgur.com/8EKb9.jpg)
Maybe a bit hard to make out, but that red thing is our button!
Nice! What team are you guys?
EDIT: I probably should've read the whole thread before asking that.