With wheels and transmissions mounted on our welded robot frame we were able to mount and test two US Digital E4P encoders to our Toughboxes. Meanwhile we have been planning locations for all of the electronics. Last year we focused on compacting all of our electronics into a small space and ran into issues with that at competition. This year we are taking a completely different approach and spreading out electronics out across several boards all mounted in easily accessible locations.

On the coding side, we have all of our teleoperated period code written for either closed-loop speed control (using the Jaguars and the US Digital encoders) or standard voltage control. Closed-loop speed control will allow us to specify the exact speed at which each motor should run, rather than simply giving the motors an arbitrary percentage. In the end, though, it will come down to which mode the drive team finds more accurate. We also have a full prototype of our autonomous code using ultrasonic distance sensors and the kit of parts line sensors. More details on that coming soon.

Last weekend we mounted the kit of parts line sensors and tried out some very simple line tracking code. We obviously were not aiming for perfection or speed (actually, we we didn’t even intent for it to be able to follow the fork). This was mostly just a test of how the line sensors detect the tape.

We are hoping to get two additional line sensors, but obtaining more line sensors seems to be difficult, since the factory has a 3-4 week delay.

The programming team has spent most of this week setting up new computers and getting all of the new electronics ready to go.

We’ve created a simple piece of wood to mount the line sensors on last year’s robot. We’ve also calibrated the sensors and tested them in code. We haven’t yet tried using them to drive the robot, but FIRST Team 842 has:

(FIRST Team 842 testing autonomous with the KoP line sensors.)

One of our biggest obstacles this week has been the CAN network on the Jaguar speed controllers. We got all 8 of our working Jaguars up to date with the latest firmware and labelled with the correct CAN IDs, but then we ran into a problem. We kept getting an UncleanStatusException when we tried to create the CANJaguar object in our code. For any other teams experiencing this issue, it turns out that it’s a bug in WPILibJ (meaning it only affects teams using Java). The bug tracker page is here. We haven’t gotten a chance to test this yet, but you should be able to solve this issue simply by updating to the latest version of the FIRST plugins in NetBeans.