The past two days were very eventful. Early morning on December first, Jake announced the HSM should allow the robot to find ammo and the enemy robot. Unfortunately our mechanism to keep the motors in place failed when one of the motors inexplicitly dropped and the wires became too damaged the motor doesn't work. Unlike every other team's motors, ours have the wires exposed from the side not the front, and securing them with our motor holds damaged the wire sheath. Now we pay the price of that. Jake tried to fix the motor by soldering the wires back but they only go half as fast and he made them in a worse state by opening it. We spent the first half of the day borrowing motors from Max and integrating them onto our assembly. While the motors do work, they seem to be slower than the motors we had before, despite being rated for 12V at 81 rpm. After that Luis continued to work on the FSM, but now he has to revise much of the code to account for the slower motors.

Later than day after taking a break, we once again blew a fuse. We don't know how but it keeps happening. To prevent this Edmond decided to tape several components to the base and insulate the wires on the terminal ports by cutting the wire so that only the sheath is exposed.

We worked in three different periods throughout the day. At midnight, Luis and Jake made yet another design change by ditching the funnel we had for the longest time, and replacing it with a smaller foamcore version to keep within the 11 inch cubed volume limit. They also changed the servo ammo releaser Edmond originally made that would sweep to release the balls, but the pulse width values that would position the servo remained constant. By changing the funnel they managed to fit the beacon detector at the front, but now the launcher relies on gravity because it is more difficult to fit a launcher and use a TIP122 to control it.

For unknown reasons Edmond was the one in the lab this afternoon so he decided to do two neglected things, create a beacon holder and a hood for the beacon detector! By using a measured foamcore thickness of 0.13 inches, the tabs securing the walls and the top portion are a snug fit and hot glue made the whole assembly very secure. Foamcore can be fairly robust after all!

The hood on the beacon detector needed more creativity to be secured while restricting the angle for which the beacon is visible. Originally we decided to use the two side walls surrounding the circuit, but would they are thin and would not be a secure fit. Instead, we reused the old servo actuator part made in MDF and secured it to the bottom of the top base. It has a glued MDF piece with a hole in the middle aligned to the photo resistor of the beacon detector. The hood mechanism worked fairly well, at close range of less than a foot, the circuit can pick up the beacon at around 30 degrees, but when further away it needs to be aligned with the beacon to detect it! We still need to test it from several feet away but this should allow an accurate shot at the enemy robot for checkoff.

Later that day we all met up to work on the HSM. Due to added weight and the new motors, our code doesn't work as well as before, it doesn't align to the T as well and we still need to work on the rest of the sub state machines before we can attempt check off. Stay tuned...