Code Developments 12/28

By Cooper

Task: Gripper swivel, extendToTowerHeight, and retractFromTowerHeight. Oh My!

Today was a long day, clocking in 10 hrs continuously. In those ten hours, I was able to make tremendous progress. Overall, we have 4 main areas of work done.

The first one gets it’s own blog post, which is the extendToTowerHeight, which encompasses fixing the 2nd controller, calculating the TPM of the arm, and calculating the TPD for the elbow.

The second focus of the day was mounting and programming the swivel of the gripper. Aaron designed a swivel mount for the gripper the night after the qualifier, which was mounted on the robot. It was taken off by Aaron to finish the design and then today I put it back on, and then wired it. Once we tested to make sure the servo actually worked, we added a method in the Crane class that swivels the gripper continuously. But, since the servo is still a static one, I was also able to implement a toggle that toggles between 90, 0, and -90. With a couple of tests we were able to determine the correct speed at which to rotate and the code ended up looking like this:

public void swivelGripper(boolean right){ if(right == true) gripperSwivel.setPosition(gripperSwivel.getPosition()-.02); else gripperSwivel.setPosition(gripperSwivel.getPosition()+.02); }

The third development was the retractFromTowerHeight() method that was written. This is complementary to extendToTowerHeight, but is significantly less complex. The goal of this method was to make retracting from the tower easier, by automatically raising and retracting the arm, such that we don’t hit the tower going down. This was made by using a previously coded articulation, retract, with a call to setElbowTargetPos before it, such that it raises the arm just enough for the gripper to miss the tower. After a couple of test runs, we got it to work perfectly. The final order of business was the jump from ticks being used on the turntable to IMU mode. It was really out of my grasp, so I asked for help from Mr.V. After a couple of hours trying to get the IMU setup for the turret, we finally got it to work, giving us our first step to the conversion. The second came with the changing of the way the turntable moves, as we made a new low level setTurntableTargetPos() method, which is what everything else will call. Finally, we converted all of the old setTurnTablePos() methods to use degrees.

Next Steps

As of now both extendToTowerHeight() and the gripper swivel are good. On the retractFromTowerHeight(), it may be important to think of the edge cases of when we are really up high. Also, the turntable is unusable until we tune PID, so that will be our first priority.