As the sun sank lower and lower late Wednesday afternoon and the light through the workshop’s double doors became softer and bluer, the Merrimack Valley High School FIRST Robotics Competition team scrambled to take advantage of the last 30 minutes the rules allotted to them to work on their bot.
“My intention tonight was to be able to test the autonomous mode, but I guess pneumatics took precedence so that didn’t end up happening,” said junior co-captain Jasmine Gormley,
She had written a chunk of the computer code her team’s robot runs on, and all of her latest work was untested.
Like others competitors in FIRST Robotics, Team 6690 “MV roboPride” bagged up their robot on Feb. 20 and is only allowed to open it up to work on it for six hours during the week before each assigned competition. For Merrimack Valley, both those contests were scheduled near the end of the season.
Last week, after more than a month of looking at their robot in the bag, the Merrimack Valley team was finally able to get back to work.
First order of business: Grab the yellow cube.
“We wanted to improve our intake system for the cube, first of all, and then we wanted to work on making sure our bumpers mounted onto the robot securely,” said co-captain Gabe Jaquith, a senior.
To move yellow cubes around the FIRST arena during matches, the team had built mechanical arms that used spring tension to grasp the boxes. The results were weak, and the team decided to rebuild the arms to use a pneumatic piston to move one of the arms from side to side.
“We need clamping pressure and a spring was not good enough,” said sophomore Brian Latham.
As the rebuilding took place, coder Gormley mostly waited.
“The code is pretty much done so far,” she said. Some was done back in February, but she had been rewriting over the past month, getting feedback from other teams. “I’ve reworked a lot of the autonomous in this time period because there’s a better way to do things,” she said.
In addition to computer code that lets drivers move the robots with wireless controllers, teams can score points by programming their bots to automatically drive themselves during the first few seconds of each game.
Gormley has been coding for a few years, but she’s trying something new this season.
“I switched into Java this year. There was some difficulty with that because it’s an unfamiliar programming language. It was basically like being a rookie again, because I didn’t know what I was doing.”
RoboPride had used C++ as a programming language in 2017, the team’s rookie year, and when they sought help from others during competition, they learned no one else knew how to use the language well enough to help them troubleshoot.
She’s now at a place where she’s comfortable with the programming language and knew what she needed to do to code the new intake arm.
“It’s pretty simple for the pneumatics. The autonomous not so much, which is why I was hoping to test it.”
Once the build team was ready to do some testing of their new arm, Gormley got to work with help from fellow programmer Jaquith.
They uploaded their code to the robot and with the push of a button on the controller, successfully got the piston to contract, closing the robot arm with more than enough force to hold a plastic cube. But they could not get the pneumatic system to open the arm back up.
They made changes to the code and tested wire connections.
Still nothing.
After an hour of reuploading bits of tweaked computer code and charging a dead laptop battery, the team shifted into cleanup mode.
“We’re going to have to ask tomorrow night how to program the pneumatics to make it work,” Gormley said.
With three minutes left of unbag time, she turned back to the robot. “I’m going to test my auto real fast.”
Nothing happened.
Despite all the problems, the students were full of smiles and laughter as they readied their robot and began deciding what they would take to the district competition at the University of New Hampshire the next day. The team, only in its second year, was still confident they would make it all work.
“This is how it was last year, too, right?” Latham had commented earlier about all the last-minute work. Besides, there was potential for five more hours of work time once they reached Durham. And that was plenty.
(Elizabeth Frantz can be reached at 369-3333, efrantz@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @lizfrantz.)