Evergreen Valley High School EVHS Robotics – The Prototypes

During the month of March, we spent lot of hours trying to finish up the robot at NASA AMES in Mountain View.   We usually did not get back home until 2 AM in the morning.

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1/23: Sunday- Short meeting in which we we mostly worked on the electrical board, and a little more CADing and labview.

1/24: Monday- We decided on moving our building headquarters from the garage to a more official space- an office space in Evergreen Square that used to be the UPS store! Its equipped with a restroom too! Awesome, isn’t it? Anyways, we had people apply for grants to Rockwell Collins and Flextronics. Worked on CADing, programming, and on the electric board.

1/25: Tuesday- loads of CADing, programing, and working on electric board. Also made a trip to Frye’s to buy more tools and materials. Named our newly acquired organizing box “Pandora’s Box” ;]

1/28: Friday- Finally get to stop the garage rotations and settle down in the Evergreen Square! So we started the move by transporting all our tools, tables, and chairs into the space. But…. our rack and pole were too large to fit into our vehicles. So, sadly, we had to disassemble it into pieces, transport it, then reassemble it. It did take some time, but fortunately, it went smoother than expected. =) Also brought in all the crates of building materials accumulated from the past build seasons. After what seemed like eons of un-packaging, tearing plastic bags, and sorting, we organized everything! Along all this, more CADing and programming as usual.

1/29: Saturday- epic CADing! Almost done CADing all the individual pieces. Started on assembling the parts.

1/30: Sunday- assembling, assembling. Aiming to send the complete CAD to All FAB soon to start CNCing the parts.

Friday (1/21/11):

This Friday, several of our team members met with Mr. Son Ho of All FAB Precision Sheetmetal, Inc. He has agreed sponsor the team by providing CNC and Metal Shop services and donating materials. We would like to thank Mr. Tran for putting us  in contact with Mr. Ho.

We continued to work on our electronics board and discussed ideas for our mini-bot.

Saturday (1/22/11):

Saturday we met at Ritu’s house and continued to CAD parts of the robot. We also filled out grants and discussed our plans for the upcoming week.

1/6: Thursday – We had a parents meeting in which we informed them of our current status and plans for the upcoming build season.

1/8: Saturday: We went to San Jose State University to be at the kick offs for the FIRST Robotics Build Season of 2011! There, they showed us this year’s game- Logomotion, in which the robot has to place inflated tubes on tall pegs- the tallest being approximately 10 feet tall. After this game play, the robot has to deploy a minibot that has to race up a pole.

After the the game was revealed, we picked up the Kit of Parts, which holds the parts needed to build the robot, and then went to Prospect to discuss game plans with other schools.

Lastly, we went to Rohan’s house to go over the game manual in depth.

1/9: Sunday- Game on! We started building the game pieces that’d be used in the competition for our robot to test on when we have it built. We worked on the base for the pole, racks, and frame for the racks.

1/10: Monday- After countless, grueling hours of drilling, sawing, measuring, and cutting, we finished constructing most of the game pieces compartments! We started brainstorming what kind of gripper to employ- either the prong or clasp. Also discussed whether to use swivel wheels or tank drive for the drive train.

1/12: Wednesday: We assembled the rack together, and started some members on Labview and Solidworks.

1/14: Friday- Had all the programmers and CADers install Labview and Solidworks. Had a session on how to use it.

1/15: Saturday- Our awesome team member Brendan’s birthday! Rick came by to answer any of our questions, gave us advice, and updated us on other team’s progress. We finally decided on a design for the robot! We decided to use a roller gripper, elevator lift, and swivel wheels, and sketched out the basic model.

1/16: Sunday- Prototyping start! We started constructing the prototype for the elevator lift out of wood. Sadly, it wouldn’t lift smoothly. The CADDers started modeling the other parts of the robot.

1/18: Tuesday- Perfected the elevator lift! We worked out the kinks by adding pulleys. Also started making the spool for the wire used in the elevator lift.

1/19: Wednesday- Started assembling the electronics board, frame for the robot, dissembling the old 2009 robot for parts, along with more programming and CADing.

1/20: Thursday- Intense CADing and programming session! And this blog is finally updated after a long hiatus thanks to an awesome person

Since my last update, our team had done several things.

1) With the help of Mr. Rick Ricardi, the mentor of Prospect High School Robotic team 2813, we had participated in a couple hands on robot repair workshop of our 2010 robot along with Westmont High Robotic team.

2) Our team had also taken The Java programing workshop offered by Saratoga high’s Robotic team.

3) Yesterday, NASA had informed us that we are one of the lucky 278 teams across the country to receive their grants! Hooray!

This past Saturday, we invited Ryan Gordon from the 2009-2010 EVHS Robotics team to give us a walk through on the operation of the FRC’s 2010 robots.   Ryan had also provided us a good introduction on Lab view, one of the programming tool used to program the robot.   We had also discussed about the role(s) that each member play in this group and the urgency to start raising fund now to cover the cost of the registration fee for the 2011 season.

We also talked briefly about Cal Game 2010 which will be held at Lynbrook High School on Friday Oct. 23 and Saturday Oct. 24.   They are still looking for volunteers to help out  in this event.    If you are interested in volunteering in this event, you should do it soon by  click on this link :  http://groups.google.com/group/wrrf-community/web/2010-cal-games-volunteers?hl=en

• Team 2854 is now officially registered for the Silicon Valley Regional Competition.  This event will take place Mar 31 – Apr 02, 2011 at San Jose University.    Since team 2854 participated in the 2010 Championships,  we’re not eligible for
  the first round of open registration for the championship event.  To participate in the 2011 Championships, we will need to earn our way through the regional.  The registration fee is $5,000.   Our team needs to pay this amount by December 2, 2010.  We have about two months to come up with the money.  We need to start raising funds now!  We got some direction of how and where to get the money from.   We should talk about this when we meet next week.
• It was nice to see a good participation of the WRFF workshop yesterday.  We have more than 10 people from team 2854 attended.   We were introduced to Labview ((short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) and cRIO-based FRC control system.  Labview is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments.  Our previous team members (Ryan Gordon is a pro at this) used Labview so I think we should use this as well.   Hopefully, Ryan can spare sometime to help us if we get stuck since he is the only few still nearby.
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Beginning C++ programming on the cRIO.

• Basics of driving, motor control, sensors, and autonomous mode. Experience in programming (C, C++, Java, PHP, etc.) is helpful but not required.”

Instructor: Gary Koerzendorfer, programming mentor for 668, 2643, and 3256.

LabVIEW and cRIO-based FRC control system:

• Tips on using LabVIEW to develop robot software for the cRIO-based FRC Control System: configuring the various Control System components; creating an FRC cRIO Robot Project in LabVIEW; using the WPI Robotics Library VIs; deploying code to the cRIO; debugging your robot code; and creating an FRC Dashboard Project. If possible, attendees should bring a laptop with the 2010 FIRST Competition Software installed to work through examples along with the instructor.
  Instructor:  Laura Rhodes, Software Engineer, Pyxis Engineering Corp.  Mentor, FRC Team 100, The Wildhats, Woodside/Carlmont/Sequoia Robotics

Introduction to Robot Sub-systems

• presented by Team 846 (2010 CalGames host), students provide an overview of all key robot sub-systems.

Basic Electronics + Intermediate Electronics

• instructor, Mike Schmidt, mentor for Team 1351, VP of WRRF B OD, and program manager for AMD.

Prospect High School had organized a training on how to use PTC’s  pro-engineer.  Pro/Engineer is an integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE solution widely used in major corporations.   We plan on becoming proficient at this tool to be able to use it in our next robot design.  There will be two training sessions.  Saturday Sept. 25 and October 2, 2010 started at 9 AM until 4 PM.