Team 1538 (The Holy Cows)

Build Season 2008!

holycows — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:53:17 +0000

Week One:
We just found out what the challenge is for this year and as of right now have no idea what we are going to build. There have been some ideas but no concensuse on any. It seems, though, that the tri-claw is the most reasonable idea. We are going to keep trying to develop new ideas but we are also going to begin modeling some of the existing ones on Solid Works.
Oh we popped a hole in our ball, lovely. So now we have to buy a new one and hopefully not pop it.

Week Two:
The marvelous Devil Duckies were so wonderful as to lend us their ball to work with so we are back in bussiness.
We have come up with designs that use a fork lift and/or penguin arms and have started making prototypes. In testing we found the penguin arms required too much force and thus that idea fails. As for the fork lift idea, we decided to mount the arms on a lift and use high density polyurithane as a scoop to remove the ball from the hurdle. We have also been working with programming the IR sensor.

Week Three:

This week has been full of prototyping and problem solving. We have the fork lift attached to our lift and have been expirimenting with ways to knock the ball down using our plastic rake. We are looking at several different ideas in knocking down the ball. We have considered using a governor since we need to be driving at a certain speed for the flap to work. We have also though about dropping the ball over the hurdle, by lifting the forks, instead of using the flap.

Week Four:

This week has just begun!!

All’s well that end’s well

Greg — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 21:22:15 +0000

WEll, its time to retire Daisy from all FIRST competitions. I’m still excited that we built her. She still served us well to, at both of our competitions, San Diego and Las Vegas, we made it to semi-finals. Even though we didn’t win we still made it farther then any of our previous years in which we were eliminated at quarter-finals. I guess all that I have left to think about is what is next year going to be like. ‘Til we meet again.

-Greg

I joined the team.

jjack — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:40:17 +0000

This is pretty cool. Admin on day 1 after I have joined the infamous Holy Cows (god must love us). Blog, I write about my day. We have a nice 100 pound robot in the makings. There are muffins on sale ($1 a piece). Exciting.

I had to drop soccer to join this club, but all is well. We beat the freshmen at soccer every time anyway.

Code error?!?!? WHAT?

Amanda Canyon — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:17:49 +0000

For the past few days, the RC (Robot Controller) has been crashing. I tried EVERYTHING to figure out what the error was; I even commented out the entire “Default_Routine()” function, but it still crashed. I finally resorted to pulling out all the “digital i/o” pwm cables, in a desperate attempt. I did not really expect this, out of all things, to do anything…. but it worked!

I ended up un-commenting all my code in the “Default_Routine()”, and ran it successfully. So why did it not like digital input? Well… it turns out that i am incapable of reading directions (like every other engineer in the world), and didnt add all the code so the encoders could initialize correctly.

I guess the moral of the story is to read the instructions…. (Haha, I doubt that is going to happen… :P)

++<3; /* more love to you all */

~ Amanda Canyon

/* Director of Programming and Electrical */

Time

jjack — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:19:41 +0000

It seems that time has flown by so fast that it’s insane. There is a very short amount of time we ship our robot away and head up that way ourselves. We have been making awesome progress and I am confident that we will be well prepared for the competition.

See you in Vegas.(I wonder if what happens there really does stay there because if we win I hope people here will know about it)

Seven days left

sadams — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:59:38 +0000

wow it’s really comeing close I don’t really understand how time can fly this fast it feels like there should be at least twelve days left, But anyways as far as I can see the robot is comeing along great. Also it looks like we are gonna get this thing out right before the deadline so tension is gonna get high and people are gonna start getting really sour, I myself am going to do my best to stay out of the crossfire and work as hard as I can doing whatever I can. It seems that I am torn in two and i don’t know what to do I came here wanting to be a programmer and now I kinda want to be in public relations I think I should decide soon…… but I guess this is the end of my first post well I hope to post many more soon

stay classy San Diego!!!!!!!

Shane Adams

12 more days!

Daniel — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:19:15 +0000

So as the end of build season draws near the robot is starting to come together. We have our cahsee, claw, and lift systems built. Soon everything will be put together and ready to go. I am currently designing our control board which will operate all the robot’s systems. The design should be done by tomorrow and as soon as we get the parts in for it the control board will be built.

15 Days Until Ship!!!

Cheyenne Manske — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 21:45:55 +0000

There are only 15 days until we have to wrap up our operations and ship off our beloved robot Daisy. Parting with a robot on the day of Ship is much like saying goodbye to a loved one. This robot has been the creation of our hard efforts over the last six weeks and it is not just the hard work and design that we have given time to, but the actions of the team itself, the relationship among the team members outside of the main goal, that has effected us the greatest. Yesterday Amanda, Brittany, David and I drove up to Irvine and presented in the Sally Ride Science Festival at University of California, Irvine. The experience was absolutely amazing! I think we all got a lot closer to each other as a team, and we also got to present to young girls which was an experience in itself.

We were part of the street fair section of the Festival and presented to over 200 girls and adults alike. We brougt our Aim High robot, Bessy, along with our VEZ robot and a LEGO Mindstorm robot to show kids how cool both small and large robots can be.

Hopefully we will get more opportunities to influence our community in the future, because yesterday rocked!

Peace and Love,

Cheyenne

Oh My Chairman’s!

Cheyenne Manske — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 19:56:45 +0000

It is nearing the end of this journey we call build season here in FIRST, and I must say, things are ramping up towards Ship Day. Since build season last year our team has been making efforts to improve our community outreach and to become more involved, and I think we have accomplished many goals. Right now I am getting a team together to help write the Chairman’s submission and it’s fun looking back and seeing how far we have come as a team.

I hope all teams do well in the coming weeks, in regard to building and completing their robots and maybe we will see some familiar faces at competition!

Peace and Love,
Cheyenne

title of champions

Jason — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 19:56:41 +0000

Just felt like adding a blog. So, I missed a couple days, I was busy with internship, work and tutoring. So we’re still working on the design for the arm. We’ve gone through a couple different prototypes, and a couple issues we ran into were things like, the weight of the claw was too much for the motor. It looks like there may be issues with it even at the last minute, because it seems like it wouldn’t be very predictable. Hopefully we will come up with a design that will allow consistency. Anyway, thats all for now