If you’ve ever been to a FIRST competition or participated on a team for any amount of time, you’re probably well aware of the culture that surrounds FIRST robotics. Students and mentors alike invest in jewelry, t-shirts, and other kinds of robotics-ware to show off their enthusiasm and passion for both STEM and robotics. This past season, I’ve stumbled upon a couple of organizations that have created some wonderful robotics-ware that I wanted to share with you.
Ghost In The Machine
As Waxahachie Robotics continues to form a new district-wide brand, many changes are being made. One of the biggest changes of this new brand happened over the weekend: our team decided on a new team name!
Dead Mouse Lives!
The lights are bright. The crowd is roaring. The grass is impossibly green and the people are impossibly spirited. This can only be one thing: a high school football game.
Last Friday, Waxahachie Robotics got the chance to show off their first group effort robot. Affectionately dubbed Dead Mouse due to the high-pitched noise it emits as well as its uncanny resemblance to a Star Wars mouse droid, the robot is designed to deliver the game ball to the referee at the beginning of the game. It has a main chassis with a mecanum drive chain to drive the robot in the middle of the field, where it extends a VEX-made arm and then opens and closes a rack-and-pinion style “hand” to give the game ball over.
Five representatives from the Waxahachie Robotics team presented Dead Mouse to the Waxahachie community at the final home game of the season for Waxahachie High School.
A Helping Hand
Every day, lives are changed by innovations in robotic technology in medical centers. Thanks to a new Stryker robotic arm in Waxahachie’s own Baylor Scott & White, local lives can be changed every day, as well.
Waxahachie Robotics, a newly formed robotics team with club members spanning across the Waxahachie High School, Waxahachie Global High School, and Waxahachie School of Choice campuses, was invited last Thursday to visit the Baylor Scott & White facility to learn about this new robotic arm. At the center, Dr. Roux explained to the students about how the arm functions and assists in knee replacement and hip socket replacement surgeries.
Code Bytes – LABview and ROBOTC – Thresholds
More school, more mental programming in English. This week, we’ll cover thresholds. Every team has at least one joystick that doesn’t line up perfectly. A threshold can fix that. You can also use a threshold to make sure you don’t accidentally move the joystick. The easiest way to do this is with the absolute value function: [Read more…]
Code Bytes – LABview and ROBOTC – Reversible Drive Train (Jeter Drive)
Hey guys. Welcome back for another byte of code. In 2014 for Aerial Assist, my team, team 2805, had two fronts on their robot: one for loading and one for shooting. To make the driving easier, I made a reversible drive train which they dubbed “Jeter Drive”. The code for it is very simple: [Read more…]
Going Old School… Really, Really Old School
FIRST Robotics is a lot of things. Innovative. Creative. Technical. Inspiring. But… is it medieval? That’s one question I never thought would be asked about a modern STEM program, but it seems that FRC is ready to try and take on a new adjective.
The game hint, usually released relatively close to kickoff, was released… in October? When I first saw it, I didn’t even think it was the game hint, because it was so early. Lo and behold, though, the video, dubbed “FRC Stronghold,” is an indicator for this year’s coming game. In the video, we see a shiny, new and improved Dozer (with bumpers!) being built by teenage engineers in blue-accentuated armor. And then… the red alliance attacks. What plays out after that is up to us.
Code Bytes – LABview & ROBOTC – Two-Button Toggle
Hey guys, welcome back for another byte of code. Sometimes you want to have more than one button on a toggle. FRC team 2805 used this in their transmission for their launcher for Aerial Assist. One button engaged the motor and one disengaged the motor. Here is an example in LABview: [Read more…]
Code Bytes – LABview & ROBOTC – Functions
Welcome back for another tip for coding robots. Functions are very useful. Bits of code such as abs(foo) and sin(foo) are functions. In ROBOTC and LABview, you can make your own functions. Functions are set up the same way as subroutines, except that they have inputs. Lets recreate the absolute value function in ROBOTC: [Read more…]
Code Bytes – ROBOTC – Multithreading
Another week of school, another week of homework, another week of code. This week’s Byte is about using multiple threads of the processor. LABview is multi-threaded by default so this week’s Byte will focus exclusively on ROBOTC.
Multi-threading in ROBOTC exploits the fact that subroutines run simultaneously ( task main() is actually a subroutine). The command you use to start a task is, conveniently, startTask(foo); . The key thing is that the task has to be defined before you can call it. So our code would look like:
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int var = 0; int foobar = 0; task foo() { var=foobar; //some code running at the same time as other code } task main() { //some code foobar = var + 1; startTask(foo); //some more code running at the same time as foo } |
The code in the task will execute once on every call, so if you put a loop in the subroutine, only call it once. Or you can call it every loop and execute one. Also, a subroutine cannot call variables initialized in a different subroutine. To use a variable in multiple subroutines, initialize it before any other code (except that of the motor and sensor setup wizard). The example code can be found here. If you have any questions, please comment below.