Meeting Log 2/21

By Jai, Anuhya, Vance, Leo, Gabriel, and Georgia

Regionals Prep: Work on Build, Code, and Presentation

With regionals just 4 days away, we had a lot to work on for TauBot2. Today, we focused on implementing a new Joint class in all of our joints in the UnderArm, soldered wires for the new Shoulder and turret assembly, and continued to wire the robot.

Code:

One issue that we had run into before was that whenever our Servos were given angles or positions that they couldn't reach, they would run themselves as fast as they could, often into other parts of the robot, which caused a lot of damage and undid a lot of our progress. Our solution to this was to run the Servos through another Class layer that did all of the calculations for Servo position given a target angle in degrees. Most importantly, it gave us the ability to control the speed of each individual Servo, which would make testing a lot less risky.

Build:

We also soldered the wires onto the slip ring and used heat shrinks to hold the wires together. This made it so that the slip ring can rotate, thus giving our robot the ability to rotate. However, the wires were incredibly thin, which led to constant failure in the soldering of the slip rings. After many many tries, however, we were able to finally get the wires fully soldered onto the slip ring. We continued to wire the UnderArm, and used heat shrink to secure wires on the Shoulder and Turret assembly. These were both exciting developments in the build progress of the new Shoulder and Turret assembly of TauBot2.

Next Steps:

With Regionals coming up soon, we are making good progress, and we need to continue to build, code, and test the robot, as well as work on our presentation.